Company executives are forbidden from trading stocks using insider knowledge, but no such law exists to prevent members of Congress from doing so.

In fact, although members of Congress deny they use insider information for their own benefit, the numbers don't lie. Members of Congress outperform the market in good markets or bad. According to Alan Ziobrowski, a business professor at Georgia State University who studied more than 6,000 personal financial disclosures from members of Congress, on average "Senators make significant abnormal returns, some place around 1 percent above the market, 12 percent a year," he told American Public Media in this audio clip. American Public Media’s Steve Henn reports.