Obama signs prohibition on insider trading

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama signed legislation Wednesday barring members of Congress, the president and thousands of federal workers from profiting from nonpublic information learned on the job, calling it an embodiment of the fundamental American value of fair play.

Obama said the move to bar insider trading among lawmakers would assure everyone “plays by the same rules.”

“It’s the notion that the powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else,” Obama said.

“If we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and our most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials,” Obama said.

The new law lets the public see more of government officials’ financial dealings, yet some members of Congress said it fell short. Lawmakers abandoned an earlier proposal to require public reports from people who gather information from Congress and sell it, mostly to investors.

Obama was joined by several lawmakers who pushed the bill through Congress, including Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican who has been targeted by Democrats and is expected to face a stiff challenge from Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor who helped launch the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.