The financial crisis and its continued lack of identifiable culprits is key to understanding why insider trading is all the rage these days with the federal law enforcement bureaucracy, and why men who run hedge funds, like Raj Rajaratnam and Steve Cohen, have become more recognizable household names than those of our banking titans. Of course, bubbles like the one that caused the risk-taking that led to the 2008 collapse are often more about irrational exuberance than the more rational act of fraud. In other words, they are difficult cases to make, and upon taking office in 2009, and with the after-effect of the financial crisis causing massive unemployment, regulatory officials in the Obama administration barely explained those nuances to a skeptical and hurting American public.
What it needed was a white-collar scandal that it could tout as having successfully prosecuted to satisfy the public’s demand for Wall Street scalps, even though insider trading had nothing to do with the practices that led to the banking debacle.
via Insider Trading: Bad, But Not the Real Scourge of Wall Street — TIME.com
