Nicole Lappin
speaker
4,192 appearances
114 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Dec
Nicole Lappin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
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Since 2012, members of Congress and their spouses have been required to disclose trades thanks to the STOCK Act, which stands for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge. Classic legislative example of creating a backronym. You know, an acronym that you just sort of back into based on what you want the abbreviation to be.
This law made it explicitly illegal for members of Congress to use non-public information they learned through their jobs to make personal financial gains, i.e. insider trading. Under the Stock Act, lawmakers must file a disclosure within 45 days of making a trade over $1,000, and that includes trades made by their spouses and their dependent children.
These disclosures are public and can be tracked pretty easily—I'll get to that in a bit— but here's the potential problem while the law requires disclosure it does not ban members of congress from owning or trading stocks i say potential problem because there are people out there who believe no one in public office should be able to own stocks while others believe disclosure should be good enough
But I think everyone can agree the penalty for not disclosing should be pretty severe. But it's not. It is basically a $200 fine. Pocket change for someone who just made a six-figure trade. Senator Gillibrand told me that disclosure isn't actually happening like it should.
So members of Congress are not great at following the rules. Interestingly, neither are judges. Federal judges are also required to file annual financial disclosures and are barred from ruling on cases where they have a financial interest.
But a bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation in 2021 found that 131 federal judges violated this rule by hearing cases involving companies in which they or their families own stock. So that's a little under 10 percent of all federal judges. That triggered a pretty significant response.
In 2022, Congress passed the Courtroom Ethics and Transparency Act, which requires judges to file trade disclosures within 45 days after just like Congress. And then, surprisingly, it gets actually a little more lax for the most important judges in the country, the Supreme Court justices. Until recently, SCOTUS didn't have to follow the same code of conduct as other federal judges.
They're now technically bound by a code of ethics adopted in late 2023, but it's toothless. There's no enforcement mechanism, and it's mostly voluntary. And in terms of financial disclosures, they do have to file annual reports, but there's no real-time trade disclosure requirement like there is for Congress or lower court judges.
So if Justice so-and-so is holding stock in, say, Chevron, and the court is hearing a major environmental case, well, there's no law stopping them from weighing in unless they choose to recuse themselves. And as we've seen, recusal is rare. As I'm talking about this, President Trump's meme coin might come to mind, right? So here are the roles for him.
The president and also the vice president and high-level executive branch officials are subject to broader ethics laws than members of Congress. High-level executive branch officials have to file detailed annual financial disclosures and are generally prohibited from participating in decisions where they have a personal financial interest.
But there is no law that explicitly bans the president or vice president from owning individual stocks. You might remember that during his first term, President Trump refused to divest from many of his business interests, raising major questions about his conflicts of interest, especially when government policy could impact his bottom line.
He claimed to have handed over operations to his sons, but that's not the same as full divestment. And now there's Trump. Not Trump himself, but the ticker T-R-U-M-P. President Trump's meme coin. The president launched the coin in January of this year, and since then, it's estimated that the coin has generated more than $324 million in trading fees for the Trump organization.
This week, the webpage for the coin announced that the top 200-ish holders of Trump coin will get to have dinner in Washington with the president.
that announcement sent the value of the coin up 50 percent and now its total market value is 2.7 billion the coins website discloses that the trump organization and affiliates own 80 percent of the coin supply so at the total market value of 2.7 billion the trump organization and allies have gained over 2.1 billion dollars from the meme coin
Whether this dinner invite will result in some sort of ethics probe remains to be seen. And while Trump is certainly pushing levers to increase the value of the coin, it is not insider trading. But there are more straightforward stories of insider trading. You've probably seen the famous examples in the news lately.
In the days before Trump rolled back the Liberation Day tariffs, Marjorie Taylor Greene bought between $10,000 and $150,000 worth of stock in companies like Adobe, Apple, and Nvidia, between $11,000 and $165,000 between $11,000 and $165,000 of stock in Amazon, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, Lululemon, Nike, Qualcomm, and Tesla, and also sold between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of U.S. Treasury bills.
Last year, Nancy Pelosi's husband sold $150K worth of stock in Visa right before the Justice Department announced an antitrust lawsuit against the company, which saved the Pelosi's a whole lot of losses. In both cases, the politicians have denied any wrongdoing. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that these investments were initiated by her financial advisor.
And to be fair, a lot of financial advisors were telling people to buy the dip. And also, hi, I told you to buy the dip too. In the case of Nancy Pelosi's husband, she denies that she shared any sensitive financial information with her husband.
But no matter the excuses on either side of the aisle, it is clear just through the performance of the portfolios of Congress members alone that insider trading is happening. And I hate it. The stock market is supposed to reward research, patience, and strategy. But when people who write the laws can also profit off them before we even know what's coming, that's not a free market.
That is a rigged game. And the truth is, you don't need to break the law to beat the market. But when lawmakers are allowed to do both, the system needs a serious reboot. Again, I'm obviously not recommending that you try to DIY insider trading. That is illegal. But you can take cues from money moves in Washington.
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