[baybal2]

> it's become clear to me that they're extremely pragmatic and want to support innovation and create a level playing field for everyone

USA has by far world's most byzantine and bizarre securities laws.

To me, this doesn't seem to be going well along that statement.

[carbocation]

The SEC doesn't make the laws, though. I tend to agree with both of you and I don't think that's a contradiction.

[kyrieeschaton]

They do though; they have incredibly wide discretion and things like insider trading effectively exist only via SEC regulation.

[dragonwriter]

> They do though; they have incredibly wide discretion and things like insider trading effectively exist only via SEC regulation.

No, insider trading is the subject of laws passed by Congress; at a minimum, the Insider Trading Sanctions Act of 1984 and Insider Trading and Securities Exchange Act of 1988. And those laws are where the SEC enforcement powers over insider trading come from.

[kyrieeschaton]

That's true to a point, but neither of those pieces of legislation actually define "insider trading" (although they do establish penalties for it). The power is more or less delegated to the SEC. There have been recent attempts to codify their present interpretation in statutory law.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/house-passes-proposed-l...

Congress in general gives extremely wide power to particular administrative bodies that does result in conduct being treated as legal or illegal purely as a result of shifting regulations. You can argue that it "derives from" legislation at some level of removal so they're not "making law"; that's a distinction without a difference.

[Retric]

Stock trading is over 400 hundred years old so terms like insider trading are meaningful even without a strict definition. The SEC’s role is one of clarification not lawmaking.

Consider, the proposed law uses the word espionage does that cover say counting the number of trucks leaving a factory? That’s the kind of thing where any specific choice is reasonable as long as everyone operates under the same rules.

[dragonwriter]

> That's true to a point, but neither of those pieces of legislation actually define "insider trading"

That's true in the narrow sense that they don't have a definitions section with the term “insider trading” and a definition. They both use “insider trading” in their titles and internal headings of the code sections they add, and specify the covered behavior (which differs slightly between the two) in the body, “purchasing or selling a security while in possession of material, nonpublic information” (15 USC 78t-1) and “purchasing or selling a security or security-based swap agreement while in possession of material, nonpublic information, or...communicating such information in connection with, a transaction on or through the facilities of a national securities exchange or from or through a broker or dealer, and which is not part of a public offering by an issuer of securities other than standardized options or security futures products” (15 USC 78u-1.)

While Congress did give the SEC the ability to set the rules around insider trading, it didn't give the SEC a blank check which the SEC used to pull the idea of insider trading and regulating it out of thin air.

[AdamN]

Which countries have less bizarre and byzantine securities laws?

[alasdair_]

Somalia and Sealand.

[empath75]

It also has the most successful stock markets.

[Ididntdothis]

I think a lot of weirdness in US regulation is because of Congress having lost the ability to make clear headed laws. There is so much friction in the partisan fights that they don’t have time and energy to write clear laws that make sense.

[dragonwriter]

> ...Congress having lost the ability to make clear headed laws.

When do you imagine they had such ability, and does much of th Byzantine nature of the securities laws really post-date that period?

> There is so much friction in the partisan fights.

No more than usual, except in the sense that because of the partisan realignment (or two overlapping realignments, one stemming from the New Deal itself, the other from Johnson's signing on to civil rights) from the New Deal until the 1990s the bitter ideological fights were somewhat less often aligned with party boundaries.

[Ididntdothis]

“bitter ideological fights were somewhat less often aligned with party boundaries.”

This is what has made things worse in my view. The people in Congress don’t vote anymore for what they personally think is right but what the party tells them to do.

[dragonwriter]

> The people in Congress don’t vote anymore for what they personally think is right but what the party tells them to do.

They don't vote any less for what they think is right, either. Political expediency has always been a major factor, even during the realignment when the national party may not have been as big of a factor (though it was always a big factor) in the expediency calculation.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> They don't vote any less for what they think is right, either

I’d like to avoid the use of the all-encompassing “they” when referring to US politics. It’s demonstrable that one, specific, major political party lost all semblance of a moral compass (or even an ideological compass) in the past couple of decades and it would be an error of judgement to presume they vote for and support what they actually believe is morally right - even by their own definition of what is right and good.

[briandear]

Oh good grief. One party didn’t “lose its moral compass.” Chuck Schumer is just as likely to support a bad law as John Cornyn. And the facts support that time and time again. “Moral compass” is such a loaded term. Banning abortion could be seen as “moral” just as easily as passing stricter banking regulation. That’s the problem — morality has become so muddled as to have become a useless measure. To me, it’s immoral to want to take money from me and give it to some favored group. To others, it’s moral to take money from me and give it to some favored group. What we need is smaller, less intrusive government, then there is less opportunity to be bothered by the morality of laws — because there would be fewer of them and they would have a smaller scope.

[lazyasciiart]

> No more than usual

Is that true? Is there a similar period in history where the Senate simply didn't hear the bills being passed by the House?