“A bill to amend the Commodity Exchange Act to ban certain Government officials from trading event contracts, and for other purposes.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section establishes in the Commodity Exchange Act a prohibition on trading event contracts (i.e., agreements based on the occurrence, extent of an occurrence, or contingency in an excluded commodity) by covered individuals—the President, Vice President, and Members of Congress—and restricts senior executive branch officials from trading event contracts involving matters in which they participate personally and substantially. It authorizes the Attorney General to pursue civil penalties in U.S. district court of up to the greater of $10,000 per violation or the profit gained, without precluding other remedies. It requires foreign boards of trade to submit quarterly reports to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on violations, with noncompliance subjecting them to registration revocation. It directs the Commission to issue a rule prohibiting the use of material nonpublic information to profit from event contract trading.
This section requires covered reporting individuals (i.e., the President, Vice President, congressional Members and officers, certain high-ranking executive branch officials, judicial officers, and candidates for those positions, per 5 U.S.C. 13103(f)(1)-(10)) to disclose event contracts (i.e., contracts whose payouts depend on specific events such as elections, per 7 U.S.C. 7a–2(d)(1)) in their financial disclosure reports under the Ethics in Government Act, as follows: (1) in annual and termination reports under 5 U.S.C. 13104(a)(9), a statement of whether the individual, spouse, or dependent child purchased, sold, or exchanged such a contract during the reporting period, including a description and value of the contract; and (2) under new 5 U.S.C. 13105(m), a periodic transaction report, including description and value, not later than 30 days after receiving notification of the transaction or 45 days after the transaction, whichever is earlier. (Thus, these requirements increase transparency of potential conflicts from event contracts tied to government-related events.)