The crime is insider trading. They have information the rest of the market does not. This is already against the law. If we really care about the law we need to enforce it even when the rich and powerful break it.
I think the general consensus is essentially “fairness” for utilitarian reasons. Markets are important, and insider trading discourages investment because it creates an impression of unfairness and increases uncertainty.
As far as I know that's how the law is structured. A second source that say the same thing:
>KESTENBAUM: And she says while everybody gets upset at insider trading because it gives someone an unfair advantage, that is not the legal reason why it gets you into trouble. The argument used these days in court for why it's illegal is that insider trading amounts to stealing information from a company. It's like theft. And so for that reason, proving that someone traded on insider information - that is not enough to convict them. If, say, a financial document from some company blows out the window, and you happen to find it sitting there on the sidewalk, Sarah says it's not insider trading for you to use that to make money in the stock market because you didn't steal it.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/460689797
As for your "fairness" hypothesis, it really doesn't hold. Is it "fair" that hedge funds can afford to spend millions on alternative data sources (eg. flying helicopters with thermal cameras over oil fields, to see how much oil is being stored) to get a edge over traders who can't? Probably not. Is it banned? No. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-12-19/helico...
2. that sounds more applicable to sellers of securities (ie. "you can't hide stuff in your quarterly statements") than insider trading.
Okay, but that's not how laws work. You can't go to the judge and say, "your honor, this person violated the SEC's mission statement and is therefore a criminal!". The mission statement might be correlated with what the law says (it might also not be, see: "to serve and protect"), but the ultimate source of truth is statues/precedence. Given that your claims contradicts what two well credentials individuals[1] claim, it seems prudent to require more evidence than just "that's SEC's mission statement". A link to the exact section of the relevant statue, or a relevant appellate court decision would do.
[1] matt levine was "a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit", and the person interviewed for the NPR story was "a defense attorney" and "now a fellow at Yale Law School".
>full name of the ‘33 Act and ‘34 Act.
Same argument as above.
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you repeating something you read on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook etc?
Senators dumping stocks prior to the pandemic shutdowns, for example.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/488593-four-senators-sol...
Reading between the lines, however, I do think people have a right to be upset due to indirect evidence.
The latter is public record. She and her husband have drastically outperformed the market for years. I think the former is undeniable given her job. Just a comment about an industry she likes or doesn't like can impact share prices.
They don't make it easy to link to specific queries, but you can pull up her financial filings here: https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/PublicDisclosure/Financi...
For evidence that she has inside information, I'd encourage you to read the wiki article for Speaker of The House, especially the sections that go over their legislative and committee-steering powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_of_the_United_States_H...
There's no smoking gun audio recording where Nancy Pelosi specifically says "Hey Paul, I'm gonna launch an investigation against Facebook and accuse them of being a monopoly tomorrow, so sell your shares now!"
I could lose my job for insider trading even without that direct proof of causality, just trading stock with material insider info leads to a presumption of wrongdoing. Since Pelosi nominally works for us, maybe she (and the rest of Congress) should be held to the same standard?
I don't think the claim is particularly incredible like you claim: around 50 members of Congress have been punished for violating the STOCK Act with fines often as high as $200.