Sunday, May 20, 2012
Insider trading not a flaw but a feature.
Gretchen Morgenson takes a look at the ballyhooed efforts of the SEC to stop insider trading and wonders if they are fighting a losing game because of the ubiquity of the problem.
Mr. Rajaratnam’s conviction, in the largest insider-trading scandal in a generation, handed a much-needed win to the beleaguered S.E.C. Only two years earlier, the commission had been lambasted for missing glaring evidence of Bernard L. Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme.Money talks and only a poor fool won't listen.
But Mr. Parmigiani and others suspect that the P.R. of the Galleon case glosses over risks that insider trading can and does occur regularly at many Wall Street firms. In their view, it has become institutionalized. The flow of information between a firm’s analysts, its traders and its clients — a lucrative heads-up on stock upgrades and downgrades, for instance — can bolster trading profits, brokerage commissions and, ultimately, Wall Street paydays. Those in the know can get rich before the rest of us know what happened.
“Prosecutors say insider trading won’t be tolerated, that this is justice,” Mr. Parmigiani says of the Galleon case. “But they refuse to acknowledge that their widespread net has a very big hole in it.”
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