single page link instead of 12 parts.<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/27/110627fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/27/110627fa_fact_...</a>
One day, mathematicians will prove that any fund doing better enough than the index must be insider trading. All those people from the 90s and 2000s, long retired by then, will be convicted. It's like in cycling when they measure too much hemoglobin in the blood they conclude the guy's doping. The funds' financial records will be their frozen piss samples.
Rajaratnam could have roped in a Congress member. Insider trading is legal to Congress
<a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/43471561" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnbc.com/id/43471561</a>
The article lionizes prosecutors and demonizes Wall Street, even to the point of quoting Eliot Spitzer on honesty. It also goes on and on about the ethnicity of the accused in this case without ever mentioning the ethnicity of many of the players in the mortgage crisis. Finally, it puts the entirety of the blame for the crisis on Wall Street and cites Dodd Frank as good legislation...and puts zero blame on the shoulders of Barney Frank, the CRA, and the Bush/Clinton/Obama push for "affordable" minority housing.<p>George Packer has an agenda, and that agenda is not truth.
I bet this kind of thing is happening ALL the time on Wall Street. This is just one particular case, one particular set of guys that got caught. I also believe that one unofficial purpose of the existence of many CxO roles (at large companies) and more especially Board seats, advisor roles, "strategic consultants", and both banking and legal advice is to help make this kind of insider info and quasi-legal information flow around to parasitic folks so they can make profitable bets on it. Especially the modern <i>de facto</i> aristocracy that exists.<p>There are just way too many people, pursuing their own self-interest, trying to maximize the money they make, with too many easy ways for folks to communicate or collude without a damning document trail, for this not to be the case. It's human nature. Particularly the kind attracted to the Wall Street kind of lifestyle and career.<p>The situation is complicated by the fact that the line is sometimes blurry between a case where you can make an ethical bet versus an unethical one. A legal bet versus an illegal one. Even supposedly ethical/legal investment is a form of betting.<p>I'll also go on record as saying I think the true purpose of <i>some</i> IPO's is to serve as a veiled excuse to induce an event that will enable people within that parasitic class to earn bucks from insider info bets. Not truly, and especially not solely, to raise investment money from the public.<p>For any pedants who may come back with criticisms: note my use of qualifiers like the word "some". I don't think it happens all the time, in all cases, and I don't think everyone involved in Wall Street or on a corporate board or at a consulting firm is necessarily unethical or doing these kinds of activities. But I've seen tons of evidence over the years that suggests that it is both common and <i>by design.</i><p>To sum up my take overall: Entrepreneurship and business good. Parasitic financial shenanigans and aristocracy bad.