Scott:
There's a huge difference between the insider trading scams of the 1980s and this piddly little stuff today, which I touched on in my earlier post. The 1980s had real schemes, real conspiracies to make lots of money with insider information. The names of Boesky, Levine and Marty Siegel, and a host of small fry like Ilan Reich and Steve Glauberman, will live on in financial ignominy and were real insider traders, trying to make big bucks. Boesky made 200 or 300 million pistoles, and only gave part of it back.
The IMCL thing, which so far is the only insider trading activity reported (over-reported, imho) was simply about a few insiders wanting to get out before a price collapse, not a conspiracy to game the system as a whole. Just some uninformed stupidity on the part of not very careful executives.
To even compare the two eras is ridiculous. The real, mega fraud of the 90s has not been insider trading, energy trading or even accounting shenanigans, but something nobody is yet pointing out (except for me and a few others): the massive fraud on the public markets perpetrated by executive compensation in the form of "incentive" stock options. Why? Because it's a much more complicated thing to explain as there are 3 or 4 parties to the transaction.
Where is Dabum? In the garden? It looks like you get your sideways markets today, if this holds.
Kb |
