Does Congress Have an Insider Trading Problem?

It wasn’t until after the Great Depression was underway in the 1930s that any meaningful regulation of Wall Street shenanigans came along, and it took another eight decades for Capitol Hill to regulate its improprieties (after intense public pressure).

“For many, many years there was kind of a full embracing of the idea that insider trading was OK for people at the pinnacles of politics,” says Jim Trusty, a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor and partner at Ifrah Law.

He calls 2012’s STOCK Act “seemingly a very common-sense measure.”

Once lawmakers got around to policing their own graft, it seemed to make sense to them, too. It passed in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives nearly unanimously.