BBT #17 Snippet | When the President Trades and Nobody Stops Him

Black Box Theory Podcast · Jun 2, 2026 · 3m · transcript

Every retail investor in this country operates under a quiet assumption: that the people with the most market-moving information are the ones legally restricted from trading on it. That assumption has never really been true at the highest level of government, and it gets harder to defend every cycle. Federal conflict-of-interest law — the statute that bars executive-branch officials from acting on matters where they have a financial stake — was written with a carve-out that explicitly does not apply to the president or the vice president. Congress trades on a 45-day disclosure window with no…