Joe Nocera, Columnist

On Insider Trading, There Ought to Be a Law

Nobody can be sure of what's legal or illegal. Judges keep changing the rules because there's no U.S. statute to guide them.

August 25, 2017 at 1:59 PM UTC

By Joe Nocera

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

Maybe it doesn't have to be this complicated.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

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The biggest problem with U.S. insider trading laws is that the U.S. has no insider trading law.

It’s true. The nation’s seminal securities statute, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, while broadly outlawing securities fraud, never even employs the phrase “insider trading.” And over the subsequent 83 years, while Congress has occasionally increased the penalty for insider trading, it has never gotten around to defining what it is.