I see this trope repeated but it’s inaccurate. Iran wasn’t stagnate. They were working toward a nuclear bomb and continuing to acquire missiles and drones which would have made future action unpalatable. And then they would have taken over the Strait and we would have been in a worse place.
Also Iran was supplying drones to Russia. That’s a good enough reason to bomb their military.
Maybe if they had a nuke Israel would cut back on sexual torture of detainees and indiscriminate bombing of vast swaths of densely populated land. I’m in favor of that scenario.
I didn’t vote for Trump but I don’t blame them. I don’t think many people foresaw him doing this on either side of the political aisle. Other stuff we disapprove of, yes. But not this.
I say that because he had famously resisted to enter extended conflict in his first term. Maybe he wanted to but now has the chance since he’s in his final years. (At least, I hope it’s his final years.) But I didn’t hear anyone predicting this before his second term.
Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.
"The U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday that it had charged 30 people allegedly linked with a decade-long insider trading scheme involving high-profile law firms."
Let me guess, these guys said something bad about Trump?
Not that it means that they didn’t do it, just that they would not have gotten charged otherwise.
The article displays a laughably out of date view of futures markets, too
There are people and institutions, such as oil producers, who will need to sell oil at a future date. They want to lock in the price today on those future sales. There are also people and institutions, such as airlines, who have a future need for oil and would like to lock in the price today.
Airlines haven’t hedged fuel in a long time and generally run a policy now of just adjusting fares whenever fuel prices change.
Oil producers sell futures simply to ensure deliver of their oil at a certain date so that someone actually shows up to pick it up.
The rest of the market is speculation, and in particular short term movements have always been very speculative and also believed to be plagued by insider trading. Airlines and oil producers do not care about minute to minute changes.
same, without context it is speculation. even with context, if the person creating the story controls the window, a window can be found which supports the story.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
It's a tax. I don't know if you specifically are one of the "taxation is theft" types, but it's absolutely wild how many of these are totally cool with the tax if it's funding insider trading payouts but not if it's paying for poor person healthcare or whatever.
I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election.
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
> You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
It’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people.
The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.
The corruption is a welcome byproduct of Trump's role as a Reality TV host who has to keep the conflict going and Hormuz closed.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
I think you’re giving Trump too much credit. If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal. The 60 day window is over. He has no appropriated money to fight the war, no public support, and no way out. There is no chess game here. It’s not even checkers. He is just trying to not have to admit he made a mistake - just with billions of dollars and lives on the line. Such sad.
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
Compare to the security on the O.G. MS-DOS PC, where every file was considered perfectly fine. Yeah, we had viruses and that meant untold bloat with anti-Virus shame-wear.
The UNIX way was always better, however, let's move along to ChromeOS. Here every file was considered harmful unless proven otherwise.
The US economy is getting gamified with prediction markets, where you can bet on anything, for example, how many out of Context Capital Letters that the orange Man uses in his social Media posts at 4 a.m.
My feeling is that, amongst this expansion in 'prediction markets', some people don't like it how mere citizens can play too. It is different if you are in Congress, you have got to make your money somehow, but having mere citizens playing the game? Get outta here!
The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going. We need a world at peace, where the 'monopoly board' isn't tossed into the air all the time. Then most of these problems would go away, albeit not all of them, as in the 'acts of god' such as earthquakes.
The Rothschilds getting news faster because they build an information network is not inside trading. Inside trading is when you have a legal and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation and are not abiding by those rules.
Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing. Stop making arguments that are just verifiably untrue.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
It’s also funny when you see their performance charted against Warren Buffet’s. Looks like Warren is a rank amateur who knows very little about the markets and buying companies for the right price compared to the likes of Nancy who must be a supreme multitasker and stock picker.
People have been strung up for less than what counts as business as usual in contemporary, rotten to the core, American business & politics.
Not really. Paul Pelosi was a tech investor. If you were heavily concentrated in META, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, etc you should have crushed the S&P too.
>Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
I’m not entirely sure if you understand what fiduciary duty actually means if you read federal ethics laws and don’t make the connection. Just because you can’t control+f “fiduciary duty” doesn’t mean the concept isn’t identical. Hell, there’s literally a law that bans insider trading futures on unknown information. Not “kind of like it”, literally named verbatim.
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
You're simply not using the word 'fiduciary' correctly. You seem to have expanded it to mean any sort of legal or ethical obligation with respect to markets, and that's not what it means.
That reads markedly like contracts I’ve seen which define the basis of an individual’s fiduciary duty in consideration of their access to that sensitive information.
They do not have a fiduciary duty that is enforceable in a court of law or equity. But the trusteeship model of representative government is basically how we've conceived of the duties of elected officials in liberal democratic republics since John Locke. As a normative matter, we feel that a public official who benefits their private interests at the expense of the public trust has violated their duties to the public. That just is what a fiduciary relationship looks like.
We’ve also decided the proper way to deal with this elections due to the obvious “who will guard the guards themselves?” problems of trying to enforce this against members of Congress or the President.
> Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
This kills the crab.
(investors are driven out of markets when it is obvious that they are being cheated)
> The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going.
This also kills the crab. (And most of us along the way: we're already in a limited kind of world war, the sort of thing that has a history of escalating)
Who else here is old enough to remember when Martha Stewart got jailed for insider trading?
Sending a letter containing public information to a place that hasn't heard yet is not insider trading, even if you own the post office. Algorithmic trading firms are doing the modern equivalent of this at all times to arbitrage the NYC/LON/HK exchanges.
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
> There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
the question is if those links and thumbnail were back then on the front page / timeline. Because otherwise how you supposed to know about the news if you have to google it first.
What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
This, as a generality. There are plenty of multi-billion-dollar Wall Street firms doing algorithmic trading. Your prospects for being smarter or faster than them are very poor.
I've heard of this working in other kinds of markets, where if you can identify the traders who consistently beat the market, and you can emulate them with precise timing, then you can beat the market too.
These were before news reports that came out with the scoop before any press conference. How would you know that some big news scoop is going to drop? You'd have to jump on every futures drop.
Civilization will be effected the same way anyway, why not make a buck of it? But you wouldn't be able to anyway because some quant's ml model would have already sucked every dollar out of the opportunity two milliseconds after the insider executed the trade
Psychopaths and sociopaths come from all types of backgrounds. One things for sure, they all tend to gravitate towards power and exploitation of people without remorse. C suite and founders are far from immune from this...
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
>It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
The American people knew who they were electing. They knew it, and they elected him anyway. Whatever damage results from that collective decision is our cross to bear.
A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to force the framing. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
>A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
If you assume the referee is actually playing the game then yes, the difference between a referee making a call to advantage their own bets to make the other team win and an opposing team making a play to make themselves win is one of those entities is engaging in corruption.
>Ah, so you were just trying to force the "set aside corruption" framing.
Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
I'm not sure what world we live in where being able to rent a helicopter implies hard work and not large amounts of preexisting wealth (generally taken by many to indicate at least some abuse of power, somewhere along the way).
It's a world where renting a helicopter is hilariously cheap available to some average person.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Gee, what could go wrong using governmental info to provide personal gain? Surely they wouldn't be tempted to start causing situations to become reality for personal gain! (ala Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
> So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are?
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
If those hedge funds are doing something that stops the market from functioning then of course there should be intervention but it doesn't seem clear to me at all that hedge funds trying to get an edge (especially in a way that's replicable by other funds) has the same effect as rampant insider trading in regards to destroying the market.
There are differences between the insider trading and your helicopter example. The theory is the better traders know the reality when making decisions, the better. When oil traders hide information about their reserves, they are working on creating a rift between the reality and the public knowledge. Helicopter is overcoming it. When Trump makes empty announcements that change prices in a purely speculative manner, but before doing this he buys futures, he is just creating instability on the market and he exploiting it. Instability is bad, the whole idea of futures is to deal with the risks stemming from the instability.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
Considering the very House, Senate, and connected buffoons with the presidency are all in on insider trading and corruption... Why shouldnt others?
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument isn't very useful or good faith when a systemic harm is highlighted. It's just contrarian muddying of the conversation.
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
The numbers are big enough that I kind of suspect it's the various funds that are doing it. They've probably have some legal gray area intel they're leveraging like paying a guy who knows a guy overseas who knows a guy who's a l33t h4x0r (i.e. someone who got erroneously invited to a group chat).
The worst part is the sharp changes in the price being traded aren't achieved by magic but rather with guns & actual human suffering
Someone has taken the Rothschild motto too literally:
“Buy when there is blood in the streets, even if it is your own.” — Baron Nathan Rothschild
https://medium.com/@douglasp.schwartz/buy-when-theres-blood-...
The war must continue in order to bring us to the status quo that was in place before we started the war.
I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
I see this trope repeated but it’s inaccurate. Iran wasn’t stagnate. They were working toward a nuclear bomb and continuing to acquire missiles and drones which would have made future action unpalatable. And then they would have taken over the Strait and we would have been in a worse place.
Also Iran was supplying drones to Russia. That’s a good enough reason to bomb their military.
Maybe if they had a nuke Israel would cut back on sexual torture of detainees and indiscriminate bombing of vast swaths of densely populated land. I’m in favor of that scenario.
> I hope that everyone responsible for this is enjoying every cent of what they get to pay at the pumps.
As if the people responsible actually feel the impact of their choices to that degree.
Maybe at least the people that put them in power (voters). But being honest, it wasn't just voters.
Arguably people who voted for Trump are somewhat responsible, and include a lot of car drivers.
(Not to imply that many Democrat politicians aren't also owned by AIPAC and big business.)
I didn’t vote for Trump but I don’t blame them. I don’t think many people foresaw him doing this on either side of the political aisle. Other stuff we disapprove of, yes. But not this.
I say that because he had famously resisted to enter extended conflict in his first term. Maybe he wanted to but now has the chance since he’s in his final years. (At least, I hope it’s his final years.) But I didn’t hear anyone predicting this before his second term.
That will be hard to achieve unless we resuscitate the leadership that was responsible for murdering 30,000 protesters earlier this year.
And killing Iranians and destroying their assets helps how the Iranian opposition?
Odd thing to blame on a bunch of schoolgirls!
Can you formulate in a short paragraph, why you think US attacked Iran, exactly.
Do you realize you're just repeating CIA talking points? of all the bad things in the world you're aware of and focusing on this one. Why?
I thought it was a lot more than that, Gaza is not a small place
If you are trading in the futures market and you don't have inside info or are not an actual supplier of the commodity, you are the sucker.
Insider trading laws are for the plebs. Tip off your cousin about an acquisition by a public company? Go to prison. Tip off your cronies about war? Business as usual.
"The U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday that it had charged 30 people allegedly linked with a decade-long insider trading scheme involving high-profile law firms."
https://www.newsweek.com/premier-law-firms-spy-ring-11920914
Let me guess, these guys said something bad about Trump? Not that it means that they didn’t do it, just that they would not have gotten charged otherwise.
The warring parties greatly influence the price of oil futures but they are not the only influences, and there are other markets
The losses of market participants and the gains from insiders is difficult for me to take seriously as a problem in commodities market
I read all of the cases in the article
The article displays a laughably out of date view of futures markets, too
Airlines haven’t hedged fuel in a long time and generally run a policy now of just adjusting fares whenever fuel prices change.Oil producers sell futures simply to ensure deliver of their oil at a certain date so that someone actually shows up to pick it up.
The rest of the market is speculation, and in particular short term movements have always been very speculative and also believed to be plagued by insider trading. Airlines and oil producers do not care about minute to minute changes.
I'd like to see the base rate. Ie were there similar bets at similar times when Trump did not make an announcement
same, without context it is speculation. even with context, if the person creating the story controls the window, a window can be found which supports the story.
Is this an oligarchy or a kakistocracy?
The Venn Diagram isn't a circle, but you need a magnifying glass to tell it from one.
>paying what in retrospect will have been an excessive price
This can be said about any negative price movement. You still get the same amount of oil you agreed to regardless of if the price goes up or down afterwards.
It's a tax. I don't know if you specifically are one of the "taxation is theft" types, but it's absolutely wild how many of these are totally cool with the tax if it's funding insider trading payouts but not if it's paying for poor person healthcare or whatever.
Yes but it is being said about a manipulated movement, not any negative price movement.
I remember one take I had in 2024 after the election.
We're all familiar with some of the "defund the police" experiments that went too far in places like Portland and San Francisco and resulted in things like epidemics of casual shoplifting.
Well, what we just did is basically the white collar crime equivalent. We now have a wide open free for all for all forms of white collar crime. You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
But as usual when someone steals $100 worth of stuff on the street that's a national crisis and those people are scum, but when people steal billions that's fine cause they're wearing suits.
> You can just insider trade, launder money, commit investment fraud, anything you want, the way you saw random people just walking into CVS drug stores years ago in SF and grabbing stuff and walking out.
Something I'd disagree with is... enforcement will not help against what causes people to turn out and steal in stores. Fix widespread poverty, get people out of homelessness, help people legitimately get off of drugs, help them get jobs even when they have convictions on the book, and then they won't need to become members of what is, essentially, small and hyperlocal crime networks.
In contrast, insider traders and billion-scale fraudsters - they do not have the need for survival pushing them to do crime. It is just pure unchecked greed that drives them.
It’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people.
The idea poor people are somehow criminal is a myth that needs to be eradicated.
The corruption is a welcome byproduct of Trump's role as a Reality TV host who has to keep the conflict going and Hormuz closed.
The fact that he is talking peace again now is just because he cannot attack before the meeting with Xi in mid May.
The real issue is US energy dominance and control of the sea routes. Which Krugman does not mention, because the effort is bipartisan and he probably likes it. The US literally has a National Energy Dominance Council:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook-rema...
It is designed to subjugate and increase EU and Asian dependencies on US exports. The EU committed to buying $750 billion in US energy exports. LNG terminals in Alaska are being approved to make Asia dependent on US energy.
This process is accelerated by the emerging forever conflict that will keep Hormuz closed. It won't be a full scale war, just pinpricks so that shipping companies don't dare to cross Hormuz.
Maybe China is able to pressure Iran in a way that the US can no longer pretend it has the right to intercept Iranian ships. But Russia is another factor:
The closure of Hormuz benefits both Russia and the US and the EU is too incompetent to negotiate Trump-style and threaten (it does not necessarily have to happen) to resume Russian imports. In an ideal world it would also block US vessels from entering the Baltic sea, because since the Greenland and now the overt Gulf energy threats the US is no longer an ally.
I think you’re giving Trump too much credit. If he starts firing shots again the war is illegal. The 60 day window is over. He has no appropriated money to fight the war, no public support, and no way out. There is no chess game here. It’s not even checkers. He is just trying to not have to admit he made a mistake - just with billions of dollars and lives on the line. Such sad.
> "The Trump administration is making no real effort to crack down on whoever is trading using inside information, and these inside traders are operating with a complete sense of impunity, assured that they can get away with it."
I think this sums it up.
The inside trader made no real effort to crack down on themselves
Why would they turn off the tap for easy money?
Indeed, since 2016.
There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
Compare to the security on the O.G. MS-DOS PC, where every file was considered perfectly fine. Yeah, we had viruses and that meant untold bloat with anti-Virus shame-wear.
The UNIX way was always better, however, let's move along to ChromeOS. Here every file was considered harmful unless proven otherwise.
The US economy is getting gamified with prediction markets, where you can bet on anything, for example, how many out of Context Capital Letters that the orange Man uses in his social Media posts at 4 a.m.
My feeling is that, amongst this expansion in 'prediction markets', some people don't like it how mere citizens can play too. It is different if you are in Congress, you have got to make your money somehow, but having mere citizens playing the game? Get outta here!
The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going. We need a world at peace, where the 'monopoly board' isn't tossed into the air all the time. Then most of these problems would go away, albeit not all of them, as in the 'acts of god' such as earthquakes.
The Rothschilds getting news faster because they build an information network is not inside trading. Inside trading is when you have a legal and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation and are not abiding by those rules.
Rothschilds getting news faster, high-frequency trading of the old days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
Supplying news as fast as possibles is also the business model of Thomson Reuters.
https://www.thetradenews.com/thomson-reuters-algo-news-feed-...
>and fiduciary duty not to trade and not to disclose information. The people working in the US government have that obligation
No they don't. They might have duties not to leak classified information, but not fiduciary duty.
Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing. Stop making arguments that are just verifiably untrue.
> Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to declare that such Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material, nonpublic information derived from their positions as Members or congressional employees or gained from performance of the individual's official responsibilities.
(Sec. 5) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to apply to Members and congressional employees, or to judicial officers or employees its prohibitions against certain transactions, involving the purchase or sale of any commodity in interstate commerce, or for future delivery, or any swap.
Extends the meaning of "covered government person" (currently restricted to Members of Congress and congressional employees) to include the President, Vice President, an employee of the U.S. Postal Service or the Postal Regulatory Commission, or any other executive branch employee.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
"Members of Congress outperformed the S&P 500—sometimes by huge amounts"
https://fortune.com/2024/01/03/members-of-congress-profit-fr...
"Congressional Stock Trading: The Law, the Conflicts, and the Push for a Ban"
https://govfacts.org/accountability-ethics/ethics-conflicts-...
"The 2 ETFs That Track Congressional Stock Trades"
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
The insider trading on oil futures is just on much bigger scale.
It’s also funny when you see their performance charted against Warren Buffet’s. Looks like Warren is a rank amateur who knows very little about the markets and buying companies for the right price compared to the likes of Nancy who must be a supreme multitasker and stock picker.
People have been strung up for less than what counts as business as usual in contemporary, rotten to the core, American business & politics.
> supreme multitasker and stock picker
Not really. Paul Pelosi was a tech investor. If you were heavily concentrated in META, AAPL, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, etc you should have crushed the S&P too.
I’m happy to report I am able to hold both violations of the law and ethics rules in similar contempt.
>Look, just come out and say you’re okay with them doing what they’re doing
Don't put words in my mouth. Moreover I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that I'm "re okay with them doing what they’re doing", when I specifically acknowledged they have a duty not to leak classified intel.
>Members and employees owe a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence to Congress, the U.S. government, and U.S. citizens with respect to material
That's not "fiduciary duty". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary#Relationships
I’m not entirely sure if you understand what fiduciary duty actually means if you read federal ethics laws and don’t make the connection. Just because you can’t control+f “fiduciary duty” doesn’t mean the concept isn’t identical. Hell, there’s literally a law that bans insider trading futures on unknown information. Not “kind of like it”, literally named verbatim.
And I’m not putting words in your mouth, I’m just calling out your revealed preferences.
You're simply not using the word 'fiduciary' correctly. You seem to have expanded it to mean any sort of legal or ethical obligation with respect to markets, and that's not what it means.
That reads markedly like contracts I’ve seen which define the basis of an individual’s fiduciary duty in consideration of their access to that sensitive information.
They do not have a fiduciary duty that is enforceable in a court of law or equity. But the trusteeship model of representative government is basically how we've conceived of the duties of elected officials in liberal democratic republics since John Locke. As a normative matter, we feel that a public official who benefits their private interests at the expense of the public trust has violated their duties to the public. That just is what a fiduciary relationship looks like.
We’ve also decided the proper way to deal with this elections due to the obvious “who will guard the guards themselves?” problems of trying to enforce this against members of Congress or the President.
> Therefore, why not assume every trade is insider dealing, unless proven otherwise?
This kills the crab.
(investors are driven out of markets when it is obvious that they are being cheated)
> The truth is that any empire needs to pick off rivals and rob them, in order to keep the empire going.
This also kills the crab. (And most of us along the way: we're already in a limited kind of world war, the sort of thing that has a history of escalating)
Who else here is old enough to remember when Martha Stewart got jailed for insider trading?
Sending a letter containing public information to a place that hasn't heard yet is not insider trading, even if you own the post office. Algorithmic trading firms are doing the modern equivalent of this at all times to arbitrage the NYC/LON/HK exchanges.
The classic example is that sitting outside a factory and counting trucks does not result in insider information, but driving the trucks does. Even though it is the same information.
> There will always be opportunities for insider trading, and there always have been. The Rothschilds could get news across Europe quicker than the kings could, so they made vast fortunes.
That is not an example of insider trading
funny aside: rothshields were mentioned more than trump in the epstein files, yet no outlet even touched that fact..
Of course this is a complete lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_of_Jeffrey_Epstein...
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/the-rothschild-dynasty-s...
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/epstein-files-show-...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/02/05/j...
the question is if those links and thumbnail were back then on the front page / timeline. Because otherwise how you supposed to know about the news if you have to google it first.
Lookit them goalposts retreating!
What if it's not insider trading and in fact the Trump inner circle has been compromised and foreign actors are trading on the news? You might think they wouldn't want to expose themselves just to make some money on oil futures, but at this point, they are bringing in billions.
Can you watch what happens on a market just before the press conference and do the same?
By the time you’ve reacted, it’s already too late.
This, as a generality. There are plenty of multi-billion-dollar Wall Street firms doing algorithmic trading. Your prospects for being smarter or faster than them are very poor.
I've heard of this working in other kinds of markets, where if you can identify the traders who consistently beat the market, and you can emulate them with precise timing, then you can beat the market too.
You'd risk amplifying every fluctuation. It's often impossible to know what's a shift vs. what's noise until it's well under way (if not over).
These were before news reports that came out with the scoop before any press conference. How would you know that some big news scoop is going to drop? You'd have to jump on every futures drop.
Eager to make bank off the back of civilisation, too? My IT colleagues continue to impress!
Civilization will be effected the same way anyway, why not make a buck of it? But you wouldn't be able to anyway because some quant's ml model would have already sucked every dollar out of the opportunity two milliseconds after the insider executed the trade
Psychopaths and sociopaths come from all types of backgrounds. One things for sure, they all tend to gravitate towards power and exploitation of people without remorse. C suite and founders are far from immune from this...
> far from immune from this...
Its a pre-requisite for the job
> C suite and founders
You missed "VC backed" in front of "founders". Most founders are good people.
It's done by Truthsocial IT team, they are tracking when he opens the app.
Good for them, I guess.
So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are? Should that be banned too? The article basically argues that any sort of edge is bad because it disincentivizes others from participating.
edit: see my subsequent comment. I'm not saying corruption is good. The whole point of the article is that it's bad beyond just corruption, and that's the point I'm pushing back on.
This insider trading isn't hedge-funds working hard to get an edge. It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power. And by doing so in this manner, they are taking money away from the actual productive people trading in the futures market.
Besides, as Matt Levine often says. In the US, insider trading is a matter of miss-appropriating information when you have a duty of confidentiality. Its not about trading when you know more than someone else. Its about trading when you know something your not supposed to share.
>It's political insiders trading ahead of public statements. They are getting gains not by dint of being incredibly smart, nor from working very hard. Instead its from abusing their position in power.
The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
>The stench of corruption is overwhelming. Yet aside from the raw corruption, these incidents also raise a larger question. The insiders ripped off the parties who sold futures to them at what turned out to be very unfavorable prices to the sellers. What broader damage does this kind of unchecked insider trading do?
> The article specifically argues that it's extra bad beyond just corruption. That's the part I'm pushing back on.
They are elected officials that are supposed to be working in our best interests, or at least the interest of their supporters.
Are they making decisions in our best interests or what makes their pocket book fatter? Poisons the whole system.
The American people knew who they were electing. They knew it, and they elected him anyway. Whatever damage results from that collective decision is our cross to bear.
Many of them will insist that they didn't know. Another group of "many" will insist that this is all somewhere between "not that bad" and "great".
The problem is that everyone else on earth has to suffer the consequences of those choices.
Again, that's bad, but still under "corruption", which is not what I, or the article is addressing.
A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
This is extremely basic incenive / money-flow tracing and "setting aside corruption" is a premise that has the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up. It smells like someone looking to force the framing. Everyone before me in this conversation was right to be suspicious of your motives in asking it, and I am suspicious as well.
>A market maker who doesn't know if their counterparty is a Trump insider looking to fleece them must ask for a bigger safety margin to cover the risk they are taking -- and not just from the insiders. Honest participants in the market get taxed in order to provide the insider payout.
That's still corruption. Your argument about other participants being "taxed" applies for other sophisticated counterparties as well, eg. hedge funds with armies of analysts and can fly helicopters around to gather intel. Unless you want to say that's bad too, the only difference between the two is that the hedge fund isn't engaging in corruption.
If you assume the referee is actually playing the game then yes, the difference between a referee making a call to advantage their own bets to make the other team win and an opposing team making a play to make themselves win is one of those entities is engaging in corruption.
Ah, so you were just trying to force the "set aside corruption" framing.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
>Ah, so you were just trying to force the "set aside corruption" framing.
Again, if you read the TFA, the entire thesis is that the insider trading is extra bad beyond corruption. The corruption itself only gets a passing mention.
The pacing of strategic military decisions being modulated to allow leading the futures market would be the very definition of "blood money".
I'm not sure what world we live in where being able to rent a helicopter implies hard work and not large amounts of preexisting wealth (generally taken by many to indicate at least some abuse of power, somewhere along the way).
Businesses require investment and a helicopter charter is probably less than a year of office space.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Okay so what are you trying to say with this quote? Are you arguing that businesses don't require investment and risk?
It's a world where renting a helicopter is hilariously cheap available to some average person.
Looking at my local tourist helicopter place, a private custom flight is $1k per ~15m. That seems like nothing if it allows you be make millions with the information.
You can’t make millions from shorts unless you’ve already got millions to risk.
Shorts don't cost much to open, just the borrow rate on the shares. As long as it goes straight down you can leverage quite a bit without getting called.
Of course, this is the fastest way to lose your shirt and everything you have ever worked for, if there is any uncertainty.
Gee, what could go wrong using governmental info to provide personal gain? Surely they wouldn't be tempted to start causing situations to become reality for personal gain! (ala Dick Cheney and Halliburton.)
Politician are servants of the people, for the people. This involves sacrifice and following the law. (I realize this is a naive statement, but shouldn't we be jailing these law breakers?)
> So if this sort of "insider trading" is bad, what does this mean for other sorts off strategies hedge funds do to get an edge, like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are?
This is allowed because you've gotten that extra information through your own methods that in theory anyone else can get access to. The problem here is they're using information that nobody else could possibly have access to, therefore its "insider" trading and it's been illegal for a long time.
If the market wants to incentivize flying a helicopter to bring it information about the real world, that's somewhere between ok and good.
If the market wants to incentivize pumping and dumping the American economy by releasing a stream of fake news from the US President, that's bad.
We should tilt the arbitrary rules away from the bad things and towards the good things.
If those hedge funds are doing something that stops the market from functioning then of course there should be intervention but it doesn't seem clear to me at all that hedge funds trying to get an edge (especially in a way that's replicable by other funds) has the same effect as rampant insider trading in regards to destroying the market.
HN will never stop surprising me with it's takes on how it's okay to make money at anyone else's expense regardless of laws, ethics or harm done
It’s really only a few people who believe this, and they’re always replied to by people vehemently disagreeing with them.
> like flying helicopters to look at how full oil storage tanks are
Unless the helicopter is dropping a bomb on a school on the way there (or back) I am not sure that the comparison is fair.
Wait, those big oil tanks don’t have lids? Doesn’t that mean rain would mix with the oil??
AFAIK the lids "float" on top of the oil, probably to prevent vapors from building up if the tank is half full.
There are differences between the insider trading and your helicopter example. The theory is the better traders know the reality when making decisions, the better. When oil traders hide information about their reserves, they are working on creating a rift between the reality and the public knowledge. Helicopter is overcoming it. When Trump makes empty announcements that change prices in a purely speculative manner, but before doing this he buys futures, he is just creating instability on the market and he exploiting it. Instability is bad, the whole idea of futures is to deal with the risks stemming from the instability.
Instability is bad, but when the cause of it is market getting new information, it becomes ok: it is bad now, but it is good in the long term. But when the instability becomes a source of profits, when there are incentives and means to create the instability, then long term benefits go away.
Considering the very House, Senate, and connected buffoons with the presidency are all in on insider trading and corruption... Why shouldnt others?
Hell, being a congresscritter in charge of oversight of $industry allows you to cheat the public cause you know what's coming. How else do you see a senator making $174k/yr but net worth's of $100M? Its legal, only cause they carved their own exemptions and scam the public.
I think Matt Levine’s take on this is best, in that the problem here is _theft_: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
> The real issue is never whether the trading was unfair to the people on the other side; it’s whether the information was misappropriated from its rightful owners
In this case the rightful owners are the American public in whose employ the leakers are. They got this information from their position of trust, and sold that information, to the disadvantage of the people they work for.
This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument isn't very useful or good faith when a systemic harm is highlighted. It's just contrarian muddying of the conversation.
>This kind of "well eksuallyyyy" argument
It's not, when the article is specifically arguing that the insider trading is bad beyond just corruption, and barely touches corruption. You don't get to tack on a weak claim on top of a strong claim, and then when the weak claim gets pushback fall back to the strong claim and say everything's fine because you're directionally correct, or claim the person pushing back is wrong because they're directionally incorrect.
The numbers are big enough that I kind of suspect it's the various funds that are doing it. They've probably have some legal gray area intel they're leveraging like paying a guy who knows a guy overseas who knows a guy who's a l33t h4x0r (i.e. someone who got erroneously invited to a group chat).