This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 27th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown. When Nancy Pelosi or

Mitch McConnell make a stock trade, you may wonder if they've got

information you don't. And then we're able to cash in on it.

Now Congress is poised to limit congressional stock trading.

Cato's Jennifer Shelp discusses them anyways that members of Congress may enrich themselves that have nothing to do with publicly

traded companies and why transparency is a better treatment than a blanket ban.

We spoke yesterday.

First if you don't mind, just characterize how this issue is presented in general and

and your quibbles with how it's presented.

I said the issue in general is presented as members of Congress are engaging in insider trading to enrich themselves,

that they're getting information as part of their jobs as representatives and they are taking

advantage of that information to make moves in the stock market before the general public

learns about it. I've equibble with that because there's little

evidence that there's actual a lot of actual insider trading going on in Congress.

There was a study that came out looking at relatively

recent trading that shows that members of Congress on average

don't do better than your average Joe in picking stocks.

In fact, they tend to do slightly worse.

But that doesn't mean there's not a problem.

Because insider trading is a very specific, narrowly defined, well maybe not as narrowly as I'd like it to be defined,

legal definition as to misuse of information.

...