I would love for this to be viable. But I can't help but think there are all sorts of ways for our intelligence agencies to ruin a person's life for not complying. I'm not even suggesting some kind of spy-novel intrigue, you can just tell them to comply or they'll drag you and your company through the mud until they get what they want. Imagine taking a principled stand and then suddenly having your life examined under a microscope by the FBI or the IRS. It would be a totally unrelated audit, just how some people tend to be subject to random additional screening at airports.
It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers.
> It's entirely plausible he was crooked, but he also claimed the NSA backed out of a deal with Qwest and then the insider trading charges showed up after he refused to comply with their (illegal) requests to spy on their customers
Read the charge sheet [1]. Is it possible that the NSA walked over to the SEC and asked them to prioritise this? Sure, why not. Is it also pretty clear cut that he insider traded? Yes.
I still see significant issues with using the threat of finicial repercussions and criminal charges to force dirty executives to comply with illegal efforts to spy on their customers.
This is problematic not just because of the violations of those customers' rights, but also because it creates perverse incentives for the government to encourage the success of dirty tech companies as means to circumvent constitutional protections.
Thus while I don't doubt Nacchio's guilt, I absolutely think that he should have atleast been allowed to use that argument as a defense in his court case so that the Government is somewhat discouraged from using such tactics by the knowledge that it can come to light in court.
> still see significant issues with using the threat of finicial repercussions and criminal charges to force dirty executives to comply with illegal efforts to spy on their customers
Any evidence regarding that was suppressed by the judge due to the possible revealing of classified information. This sort of suppression is precisely my objection as it effectively allows the government to operate with impunity.
I don't claim to know if the claims were true, I just think they should have been assessed in court.
It's difficult to win in an SEC governed market that is corrupt by design. You'd need a competitive advantage large enough to bridge the SECs designed corruption in the market.
What does this even mean? That it’s difficult to make your stock go up because the SEC has rigged the market?
Read through Tesla’s history with the SEC, specifically Musk being immature and committing securities fraud on Twitter. They’ve fined him and the company, and there is no love lost between the two, but TSLA is still going up.
Spend even just a couple hours researching dark pools and naked shorts and it becomes blindingly obvious the SEC exists to do anything but protect consumers.
The twitter outrage over elon's comments are nothing more than a woefully uninformed public hoping to remove the tip without addressing the iceburg underneath.
If every one of your competition doesn't have to play by the rules, you'll find it hard to beat them playing honestly and you'll find that over time the only winners left are the cheaters.
The market design is unfavorable to retail investors and traders partly due the regulations and laws in the US.
- flow internalization which reduces liquidity on venues and widens spreads
- dark pools which is liquidity only available to institutions, therefore removing liquidity from venues that retail trades on
- market fragmentation which harms retail investors who don't have the execution sophistication of HFT or execution algos
- short sale restriction which harms retail traders who incur excess slippage
- allowing market makers to naked short sell but not retail investors which harms retail investors because they have to pay rents to access it
- trading halts which benefit institutions (over retail) who have the execution sophistication to handle unhalts and who can price warrants etc better while the product is halted
One could argue that's the problem: They got a slap on the wrist instead of crippling punishment for illegal behavior, and there are companies that may be farther in the electric vehicle game than they are today, because they didn't employ a grandiose, law-flouting CEO to prop up their stock.
This is what I fear is going to happen once surveillance-type robots start appearing in the streets. The narrative is that we'd somehow destroy them on sight but the truth is that that would be criminally persecuted.
Both things will happen. In some locations they will be destroyed despite the potential consequences, in other locations the population will rationalize their presence as being a good thing. It'll vary by affluence, culture. Poor people will tolerate them a lot less than rich people (rich people will believe that they make the area safer and will accept the trade-off).
