U.S. SEC Wins 'Shadow Insider Trading' Trial

Obvious violation of securities laws, with hundreds of millions in profit. Who knows if he’ll ever be held accountable. Musk seems to delight in mocking the SEC.

Not true [1]. (Enforcement leaves much to be desired.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

In practice I assume this would be in breach of your employment contract?

What point of view did you get training from other than the point of view of your company's compliance department? I've worked in trading for a long time and never got training from any other source.

Compliance should tell you to take a very conservative view of the law: they have basically nothing to gain from allowing you to trade in a gray area, but you might.

That doesn't mean the SEC or the District Court should take the same conservative view. They have to apply a balanced reading of the law and look at historical precedent.

So they find these dubious trades and then check the trader's trading history and personal wealth? Stuff like that?

Basically the trade is automatically flagged and then they notice, for example, that the dude hardly ever trades, never traded that stock, isn't familiar with $120K wins on a trade, etc.?

And if it all ticks, they then check which company he works for and it there's a relation with the company he traded?

I mean: it is amazing that they got him to me. But I find it also, in a way, quite spooky.

There's definitely a vibe in the comments in this thread, including from mine, about "going after the little guys".

The governments of all countries 'print' new money at a steady rate; simultaneously devaluing all their currencies. They do this by issuing bonds, some of those bonds are bought up by the markets but most bonds are bought up by reserve banks using money that they printed out of nothing (mostly digitally). This issuance of new money devalues the savings of regular citizens and, most importantly, their salaries listed on their work contracts which are denominated in the national currency.

The government debts of all countries keep increasing ad-infinitum along with the interest on that debt. More debt with more interest means that the governments need to keep issuing more bonds to get even more money to use to pay back the old debts plus interest, which then increases the debt even more and guarantees that more future money printing/borrowing is necessary.

Countries don't strictly need to tax citizens since they can just print money, but the reason they tax citizens is to help keep inflation under control by reducing the supply of currency floating around the economy. The fiat currencies of all countries are inflating but this is not noticeable (to traders, economists, etc...) so long as all currencies inflate at a similar rate; the foreign exchange rates will be stable.

Governments give out increasingly large contracts to large corporations to produce systems, weapons, etc... that add no value to citizens' lives but merely exists to control and passify them. People who are in close proximity to government money printers have access to easy money. Those who do not have to work hard for it. Look up Cantillon effects.

At current tax rates, money cannot hop far from the government's money printer. Consider that every transaction between citizens is taxed at some rate... Say 30% (a mix of income taxes, sales taxes...) Start with $100, see how much money is left after just 10 hops between different people. After 1 hop, $70 is left to spend, after 2 hops $49 is left, after 3 hops $34 is left... After 10 hops, only $2.80 remains from that 100 dollars!

So not only is all money created by the government (or banks that are backed by the central bank which is also a government entity), but the taxation system ensures that money cannot travel too far from that government. It's a closed loop with monetary abundance near the source and extreme scarcity at the periphery. It puts the Cantillon effect on steroids. All artificial, little to do with the so-called free market. How can big cities afford to accommodate millions of people working bullshit office jobs that add no value? Big cities, by virtue of having millions of people, control huge amounts of collateral, which gives them access to bigger loans and bigger gov contracts, which puts them in the front row of the money printers; which makes their capital holders the biggest beneficiaries of Cantillon effects... With those powerful Cantillon effects, the business elite can afford to be inefficient and sustain millions of bullshit jobs.

This is barely scratching the surface. I could write a book about it... But nobody would buy it... Because the media is monopolized and nobody would know the book exists. Not only that, but nobody who has money to buy the book has an incentive to understand this information... And they certainly won't be recommending it to their friends...

The system is basically as unjust as it can possibly be while still just barely avoiding being exposed as such. Society has become an epic PsyOp; complete with eugenics and elite selection; selecting for increasingly delusional, hypocritical and/or oblivious leaders who can continue running the system while it becomes increasingly dysfunctional.

The moment when a business leader starts to notice that something is off is the moment that they get replaced by someone who is even more delusional/oblivious and who can take the company/organization to the next level, unimpeded by common sense or principles.

For the next phase, I predict AI is going to make the economy and the monetary system even more complicated. It's going to be even more unjust and even harder to explain. AI will be able to create alternative realities for us. It will control the flow of information in ways that will keep us trapped in hermetically sealed filter bubbles.

There are millions of people suffering in silence whose opportunities have been stolen from them and they don't even know what's happening. The current system is absolutely immoral. Please point out any flaw in my arguments.

That would be news to me?

Money is created all the time and also lost. The central banks try to keep prices stable, by influencing the rate in which money gets created, so why should it be zero sum?

(not a US citicen, though, but I belive the US central banking system works this way)

“Fiscal usually refers to government finance” [1]. By definition, the government can create and destroy money by fiat. It is not a zero-sum system.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal

This. Rants of the GP's type are pretty common after one gets an intro to the monetary system with a little bias thrown in. These are readily available on a YouTube near you.

They tend to be vague and talk about "the banking system" or "the economy" or "the government" being somehow corrupt or rigged, as if by design.

Thing is, they're not wrong that something is amiss, but it's not the systems in general. It's private people and corporations that are doing the rigging. Free flow of money into politics courtesy of Citizens United, regulatory capture, a purchased SCOTUS that now openly represents anti-democratic ideals and defangs government in favor of oligarchs, etc.

And, it's accelerating. Who'll even need regulatory capture anymore when you can just have SCOTUS nix the government's power to regulate?

These are the actual issues and their source is pretty clear. Through that lens, vague ideas about "the system" seem so egregiously obvious a distraction, they read like disinfo.

Most of that money which the government created comes back to the government via taxes. High taxes keep the loop short. Like I said, after 10 hops, with just 30% tax, $100 ends up being taxed down to $2.80... So say a corporation receives a $1 billion gov contracts, pays their executives and employees, then their employees pay rent to their landlords, then the landlords pay builders for renovations, etc... 10 hops and only $28 million remains of that 1 billion... $972 million is back in the government's hands whence it originated.

It's just a matter of time before that full $1 billion dollars has hopped its way right back into the government's hands via taxes.