Way beyond regulatory capture
The Associated Press: FBI probes possible insider trading by SEC lawyers
And SEC top management thought it was a good idea to rely on everybody to just tell them when they made trades that could present the appearance of a conflict of interest.
This kind of thing makes me angry not only because it means corrupt administration of a public trust and companies getting away with stuff because their regulators are busy thinking about graft. But also because it effectively penalizes all the people at the SEC or elsewhere who play by the rules. The ones who do their jobs right and honestly get treated as if they're corrupt, get paid as if they were padding their incomes with corrupt side deals, get hassled within the organization for making their corrupt colleagues lives more difficult.
For example, they both traded in the stock of a large financial company after being told by a colleague about investigations of the company, a violation of SEC rules, according to the report. "SEC attorneys are supposed to spend their time trying to prosecute insider trading, not profit from it," Grassley said in a statement Friday. "The SEC needs a better system to deter misconduct and give the public confidence that this sort of thing isn't a systemic problem." Two months before an SEC investigation of a large health care company was opened, according to Kotz's report, the female attorney sold all her shares in the company. She traded stocks 247 times between in 2006 and 2007, the report said.This is what happens when you put a bunch of Wall Street anti-regulation types in charge of the SEC. A culture of corruption so deep that the people involved in it barely even understand that they're corrupt. Maybe they just think of it as a nice perk of their job. But if you're making 100+ trades a year in companies you and your colleagues are charged with overseeing, you can't help but have your trading influenced by what you know. (And for that matter, you can't help but be taking time out from when you should be doing your job to think about how your job is going to make you a profit in the market.)
And SEC top management thought it was a good idea to rely on everybody to just tell them when they made trades that could present the appearance of a conflict of interest.
This kind of thing makes me angry not only because it means corrupt administration of a public trust and companies getting away with stuff because their regulators are busy thinking about graft. But also because it effectively penalizes all the people at the SEC or elsewhere who play by the rules. The ones who do their jobs right and honestly get treated as if they're corrupt, get paid as if they were padding their incomes with corrupt side deals, get hassled within the organization for making their corrupt colleagues lives more difficult.
