Insider trading ban signed into law by President Obama

President Barack Obama signed legislation Wednesday barring members of Congress, the president and thousands of federal workers from profiting from nonpublic information learned on the job.

Obama said the move to bar insider trading among lawmakers would assure everyone "plays by the same rules," The Associated Press reported.

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"It's the notion that the powerful shouldn't get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else," the AP reported Obama as saying.

The legislation, referred to as the STOCK Act, is designed to prohibit members of Congress, their families and staff from using any information gleaned while working on the Hill to execute stock transactions, according to MSNBC.

The new law lets the public see more of government officials' financial dealings yet some members of Congress said it fell short. Lawmakers abandoned an earlier proposal to require public reports from people who gather information from Congress and sell it, mostly to investors, the AP reported.

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Insider trading is illegal already, but whether the law could be applied to Capitol Hill was a matter of dispute, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Eight members of Congress from both parties attended the signing, but the presence of Republican Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown was maybe the most politically significant, MSNBC reported.

Brown faces a tough re-election battle against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, the president's former consumer financial protection czar, according to MSNBC.