Managing money. Not taxpayers, of course, but their own. The finance page of the Oct. 31 New Yorker tells us that in a study of 6,000 transactions between 1993 and 1998, senators beat the market, on average, by 12% annually.
Statistics alone never indicted anybody, but in a world in which fund managers that beat the market by 2% per anum make millions, I see two possible reasons for this:
- The truly smart money managers tend to skip Wall Street and enter politics, choosing to exercise their immense knack for investing only casually with their own money.
- Your senators are trading on insider information for personal gain.
Bill Frist is likely to be only the most obvious, the dumbest of the bunch and least able to cover his tracks.
