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Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

With all respect, this is absolutely small fry in the scheme of things. Insider trading goes on all the time, irrespective of market conditions. Insider trading did not cause the financial collapse. This type of story is likely to happen in any decade you care to mention, and is not indicative of the wider culture of taking big bets based on other people's money, and getting richly rewarded for it.

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No, but it is an indication of the "enforcement" and regulation bodies being cowed and coopted by the bankers, which certainly effects the handling of the recent clusterfuck by the same bodies.

If they aren't going to let an investigator bring John Mack in to talk about a little insider trading case, they certainly aren't going to bring him and his peers in to talk about melting down the financial system, unless their message is "can we throw any more free money at you?"

I agree with you here, but this doesn't detract from my main original point. All of the things which caused the problem were totally legal at the time they were done. So while side-issues like this are criminal and deserve to be punished, the actual things that caused the problems were completely legal. The Sec investigators couldn't prosecute for melting down the financial system, because it was being done within the law. The law was (and is) wrong, but that doesn't make most people on 'Wall St' criminals.

Among all the things wrong with the financial system, insider trading is arguably the least important. The publicly known conflicts of interests should be alarming all in themselves.

Auto theft goes on all the time, but if a car that was reported stolen on Monday showed up in my driveway on Tuesday, and a cop showed up to ask me a few questions, I wouldn’t be able to get him fired.

Good point, the fact that he went to a 4th level boss above the agent is telling. When a trader has a direct line to the top of the SEC, there is a real problem.

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