The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission believes that Capitol Hill’s new law barring insider trading by lawmakers will help her team’s investigations, but she refused to name any targets.
“I won’t answer your…question,” Mary Schapiro told Washington Secrets when pressed to name lawmakers under investigation. Then she joked, “let me pull out my list.”
She did have praise for the so-called Stock Act, approved in different forms by the House and Senate, noting that it would give House and Senate members an explicit “duty” not to act on nonpublic information in stock trades.
“We need to show a violation of duty when we bring an insider trading case,” said Schapiro.
At a media breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, Schapiro also took a shot at social media and the way inside traders hype stocks. Shapiro said that it makes investigating cases hard, especially because the information disappears so fast.
