It provided a 60-day comment period on the proposed rule regarding insider transactions.

First, it required that all insider transactions had to be disclosed within days.

Richard C. Breeden, S.E.C. chairman, said more than 115,000 forms listing more than 200,000 insider transactions were reported to the S.E.C. in 1989.

Did the executives make some bad investments, spending $120 million on deals that generated little return, or did they breach their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders through a series of insider transactions?

"In the 1990's, for example, there used to be more odious insider transactions," she said, "or part-time chief executive officers who would have outside interests that conflicted with their running of the public company."

So I asked Bob Gabele, an expert on insider transactions at 3DAdvisors, an independent equity research firm, to provide a historical perspective on the recent sales by insiders at NVR.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bush called for a halt to those types of insider transactions, challenging corporate directors to "put an end to all company loans to corporate officers."

In many cases, it appears that the corporations in trouble lacked a robust corporate compliance program that perhaps would have triggered a greater scrutiny of the balance sheets and the insider transactions by the audit committees.

"These are executive bonuses and incentives, not the kind of secret insider transactions that Congress was worried about in 1934," said Brian Lane, the S.E.C.'s corporate-finance director.

For example, Fannie Mae only recently pledged to begin filing its financial statements and reporting its executives' insider transactions with the Securities and Exchange Commission.