… round-up gets going, check your university’s trustees, its Outstanding Alumni Award winners… Check the names on your most prominent buildings, because some of those donors might be going to jail…
Matt Taibbi gets at the heart of insider culture:
The other crimes on Wall Street have been so pervasive and so massive in scope in the past decade or so that good old-fashioned insider trading — hedge funds and other gamblers robbing the great mass of uninformed investors by acting on exclusive intelligence not available to the rest of us — seems almost quaint.
… However there is a mounting pile of evidence suggesting a sort of widespread culture of insider trading in which a few players (specifically the major banks and a few of the biggest and best-connected hedge funds) have milked a seemingly endless stream of exclusive information, not occasionally or opportunistically but as an ongoing commercial strategy.
For sure some of the robbers have turned some of their loot over to their beloved alma maters – rather in the way Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin cut Yeshiva University into some of their winnings.
UD gets a nice warm feeling as she anticipates knowing which campuses have the most insider traders in the most prominent positions.
November 21st, 2010 at 1:13AM
Zerohedge points out they have been banging the drum on this malaise in the markets for quite some time. It’s always unsettling when the people who are accused of having the biggest tinfoil hats are the ones right on the money.
November 21st, 2010 at 5:16AM
Hedge Fund persons are anticipated to be on the conceited side. But for them to sense they are entitled to their special status as the last insider brings into question the idea that the majority of us has an opportunity of making money off investments. Which compromises potential growth of economy.
November 21st, 2010 at 5:51AM
Not sure I understand your point, Elli; but if you mean that the word “insider” – and various legitimate forms of insider information – shouldn’t be tainted by this crime, agreed.
November 21st, 2010 at 10:27AM
I read Elli’s comment as saying something like:
“The majority of us may come to believe that the game has been rigged in their own favor by the insiders, so that we who are outsiders can no longer make money by investing. But if we stop investing, then the economy will cease to grow.”
To which I say: in that case, let it cease to grow!
Our growing economy no longer creates enough new jobs *in this country* for the jobless. Nor does enough of the growth trickle down to the paychecks of those *in this country* who still do have jobs, so that they can keep on holding their own ground economically.
To put it in other terms, a rising tide may indeed lift all boats. However, it also drowns all those who have no boat of their own, or whose boats have been drilled full of holes by the insiders. The majority of us seem well on our way to drowning in this growing economy of ours.