Juggling Dynamite

“President Barack Obama Wednesday signed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act nearly five months after CBS’s 60 Minutes report on how some members of Congress had been profiting from financial trades based upon undisclosed Congressional knowledge, commonly referred to as insider trading…

You wouldn’t think Congress would actually need a law banning themselves from trading on inside political information, but it turns out they do because there is a pervasive “cultural problem” penetrating Washington, D.C. “It’s not about the money, it’s about a sense of entitlement,” says Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out and the centerpiece of the 60 Minutes expose. “It’s a sense of ‘I deserve to have more and the rules don’t apply to me.'” Here is a direct link.

“With banks making record profits and the people frustrated by low interest rates on deposits and lack of lending, a nation’s leader is speaking out: “Let me be frank. Our banks earn profit too easily. Why? Because a small number of large banks have a monopoly.”

Those comments came not from President Obama, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke or any other U.S. policymaker; instead, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made them during a broadcast on China’s state-run National Radio. Here is the direct link.

Tony Sanders, Senior Scholar at Mercatus Center, George Mason University says the European Central Bank’s long-term refinancing operation, which has been cheered by the markets isn’t a good long-term policy. Here is the direct link.