This is a column from Reuters’ Richard Beales. I’ve put it up for two reasons. The first is that it’s a fine piece of writing. The second is the author has the same suspicions I have that the hoopla over the insider trading arrests is just hoopla. Only small, very small, fish will get caught and the big ones will walk away. There are a lot of very big fish that deserve de-scaling.

From Reuters –

The widening U.S. insider trading probe brought more arrests on Thursday. Three were technology firm employees who, together with another, earned over $400,000 moonlighting as expert consultants. That kind of gig sounds a bit too good to be true. And they are now alleged to have shared inside information with hedge funds and others. But the key question is still which bigger fish the enforcers are after.

Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, alleges that staffers at Dell, AMD, Flextronics and TSMC distributed inside information. They got their consulting work through Primary Global Research, a California firm that boasts a network of such experts.

As the scale of the investigation into insider trading becomes clearer, it would be an anti-climax if mid-level executives at tech firms were the ultimate targets. But it’s not clear who is. An absence of evidence isn’t stopping the popular vote going to Steven Cohen of SAC Capital, a big enough fish to own Damien Hirst’s pickled shark as part of a probably unmatched collection of cutting-edge contemporary art. But the reality is that nothing so far goes directly to SAC’s Jeff Koons-adorned lobby.

Exactly. Four hundred thousand bucks is a lot of money to me but to Wall Street, it’s a fraction of a  bonus. I want some criminals to go down, criminals whose thefts range in the hundreds of million, maybe billions. The only way to curb Wall Street Greed is by prosecution and regulations with teeth. Moral exhortation is wasted on the criminal. The financial elite of this country not only do not respond to moral persuasion, they have their own philosophy in which they play the role of heroes beset by their inferiors.

And here, the government cooperates by putting up a smoke screen of small malefactors scooped up. This demonstrates that the government is on the job and implies that there is no greater wrong doing. Once again the big fish swim away content.

Oh, by the way, use the link and read the whole thing. This is good stuff. The Brits are less concerned with the sell, sell, sell attitude of their American counterparts and more concerned with decent journalism. That’s why you see me draw from those sources instead of running to CBS Moneywatch’s Five Reasons Not to Get an MBA. That’s not journalism. It’s just idle speculation about a future that is hardly predictable.

James Pilant