President Obama signs legislation banning insider trading by top officials

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President Barack Obama signed legislation on Wednesday banning members of Congress, himself, and thousands of federal workers from profiting from nonpublic information learned on the job, referring to it as an embodiment of the fundamental American value of fair play. The president said the new legislation would assure everyone “plays by the same rules.” President Obama said, “It’s the notion that the powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else. If we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and our most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials.” It was a rare bipartisan moment that brought both Democrats and Republicans to common ground.

The new legislation signed by the president allows the public to see more of government officials’ financial dealings; although some members of Congress said it fell short and abandoned earlier proposals. Obama was joined by some lawmakers who helped push the bill through Congress, including Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown, who had been targeted by Democrats. The new law, the STOCK Act, which stands for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, requires that public reports of new transactions exceeding $1,000 be posted online either 30 days after the individual was notified of a transaction in his or her account, or 45 days after the transaction. The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), which is an independent ethics office of the House run by a board outside Congress, has reviewed the trading activities of Representative Spencer Bachus, R-Ala. Bachus made more than three dozen trades in the two months surrounding the 2008 financial collapse and the subsequent $700 billion economic bailout passed by Congress. Bachus, the current chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, denies using any inside information and wrongdoing.




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