How insider trading becomes endemic
This week’s New Yorker has George Packer’s massive, 11,000-word article on Raj Rajaratnam, his prosecutor Preet Bharara, and financial prosecutions. Highly recommended. But there was one line in particular which jumped out at me:
If there are examples of people whom Rajaratnam unsuccessfully tried to corrupt, they have not surfaced in the voluminous public record on Galleon.
I asked Packer what he meant by this. Is it simply a narrow statement about “the voluminous public record on Galleon”? Is it possible that Rajaratnam never met someone he couldn’t corrupt? Or is it something in the middle, maybe that Rajaratnam had an extremely good nose for the kind of people who could be corrupted?
I wanted to know just how malign Packer considers Raj to be. If you or I had been approached by Raj in full flower, would he have corrupted us, too? I have an image of Raj as someone a bit like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, only instead of killing the people who come across his path he just turns them into insider traders.
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