Rules for thee? Peter Schweizer discusses insider trading by elected officials in Congress 

Peter Schweizer, a journalist and author, speaks about his influential work in uncovering the prevalence of insider trading by elected officials in Congress, a felony that would get the average-person an maximum sentence of 20 years in Federal prison. Schweizer uncovered this phenomenon through a publication in 2008, that laid out how ‘the average investor underperforms the stock market with their stock picks’, comparative to the ‘the average hedge fund, or at that time was beating the market by four or 5% a year’. Interestingly, the article ‘noted that the average US senator was beating the market by 12% a year’. Schweizer’s work would be influential in having a law passed to help with the transparency of this issue. Later, by a bi-partisan effort in Congress, would eliminate the requirement of inside trading, essentially making it ‘very hard now to prove that an elected official is engaged in insider trading’.