The answer, as an article in The Atlantic implies, is to get elected to Congress.
Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist.
Is Your Congressman Trading on Inside Information?
By Megan McArdle
Nov 14 2011, 10:27 AM ET 155
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress" ~Mark Twain
CBS aired a report last night about congressional insider trading, based on a new book by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution. The allegations are pretty lurid:
After seeing similar accusations floating around the web for years, I finally wrote a story about this phenomenon a few months ago. While I have not yet read Schweizer's book, the academic evidence on congressional insider trading is mixed: an older study found a huge effect (Senators outperform the market by 12%, while house members outperform by a still impressive 6%); but a newer study, as yet unpublished, showed that as a group, congressmen slightly under-perform index funds.
How to reconcile this with the eye-popping trades described in the 60 Minutes piece? Spencer Bachus betting that the economy would tank right after he was briefed on the financial crisis in 2008; John Boehner buying health insurance stocks shortly before the public option was finally killed; Nancy Pelosi getting preferential IPO shares in Visa right around the time a bill that would have hurt credit card processors was defeated....
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