Thursday, November 5, 2009

Government Admits Driving Wall Street to Act Like Drug Dealers

At a press conference announcing the latest insider trading busts, the government has admitted that it is turning those seeking to make the markets more efficient (by aggressively seeking out important information), more like drug dealers.

That's what happens when you start making more laws and stretch laws, you cause more and more of a society to protect themselves by using the methods of drug dealers.

"We allege some of the defendants [were] taking a page from the drug dealers' playbook [and] deliberately used anonymous, hard-to-trace, pre-paid cellphones in order to avoid law enforcement detection," federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told a news conference.

"When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such," he said.

It is absurd to say that they are treating those arrested as common criminals because they use pre-paid cellphones, as though they wouldn't have been arrested if they hadn't used pre-paid phones, or somehow been treated differently after being arrested.

Bharara sounds like a real life Hamilton Burger, and he is the new U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Sharp defense attorneys are going to have a field day with this guy.

2 comments:

  1. It's how they draw distinctions between those arrested and Stephen Friedman/Dick Durbin, insiders who traded on nonpublic information in the midst of the meltdown.

    It sounds like Rahm's craftmanship.

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  2. From the linked article:

    "Much of the alleged insider trading involved the private equity boom in 2007, according to the complaints."

    Why am I not surprised PEU's (private equity underwriters) were involved?

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