Rajat Gupta Convicted of Insider Trading
dealbook.nytimes.com
dealbook.nytimes.com
Also, I'm quite astonished by the fact that that 60 of the 66 charges have been resolved by guilty pleas or verdict. In many of these high profile cases, detractors claim 'witch hunt', and a quite often win on appeal. However, with these statistics, anyone who claims that there isn't something rotten going on is on doesn't have much to stand on.
All in all however, a 63 year old man who was something of a personal icon is going to jail. Sad, particularly for his family, but count me impressed by Preet Bharara.
PS FTR: I'm old, and white.
I find that gambling in stocks is more dangerous than playing the lottery once a week.
Some will argue with me and tell me that 'if you work hard and study the market, you will know how to play stocks' but my question to them is why are they reading this post?
CNBC has this show I like to watch called American Greed where they talk about people who do scams from large to small.
They had a great episode about the guy he got caught dealing with Raj Rajaratnam
Episode summary here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/45555924
If you scroll all the way to bottom you can even here a recording of one of their conversations
I wonder what kind of biases or vested interests (perhaps) we can infer from this. (Or perhaps I'm overthinking this)
At the same time, it's definitely of note that Gupta not only headed up McKinsey but that he violated its core principle of client confidentiality:
<< “McKinsey’s core business principle is to guard the confidential and private information of its clients,” said a former McKinsey executive who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. “It is mind-blowing that the guy who ran the firm for so many years could be going to jail for violating that principle.” >>
So I can see why both associations would be worth noting. I don't think there's a major bias or vested interest here.
This made me spit coffee on my keyboard.
Preet Bahrara (being Brown himself) finds it easier to go after the Indian guys than high powered White financiers. Will be great to see this proven wrong and White (All) crooks paying the price. Right now these guys are the white collar criminal equivalent of Blacks for lower level criminal activity – over represented due to race bias.
I think Rajat just had the friend who got caught or he might not have realized (unlikely) what Ratnam was doing with the information or he thought he'd never get caught because its pretty normal behavior on wall street.
I'd bet its the latter. Insider trading is much more prevalent than people think.
“I don’t know who came up with this business that Rajat had billionaire envy,” said Anil Sood, a childhood friend from India who now lives in Virginia. “He has always been quite content with his wealth.”
Net worth of only $130,000,000? No, clearly this man has never been driven by material gain!
I feel sorry that the guy didn't get better advice from his peers.
You could fine him treble damages or something, but if most of his income derived from insider trading, there's no way to apply the penalty.
Insider trading is basically theft, only with no specific victim, and no broken windows; a very clean crime. Insider trading is stealing from other shareholders, which might include pension funds of HN readers.
Some discussion of impacts of insider trading here - http://money.howstuffworks.com/insider-trading3.htm
What's up with this?
It's nicer to think of them as being completely innocent though.
Its a common thing for people doing evil to feel bad and doing good things to make themselves feel better. Vito Corleone was named "godfather" with a good reason.
And following your thinking, one can cry for Adolph Hitler, because:
- he overcame chaos in Germany, restored order and enormously raised production in all fields of national economy
- he politically united the German nation
- he rearmed it militarily
- he tried to liquidate the Treaty
- he have restored the Reich and the provinces grabbed from Germany in 1919
- he had led millions of deeply unhappy Germans back into the Fatherland
.. and so on. Now, would you cry for him?
edit: obviously looking back in time, he turned out to be a monster, but at some point he had over 90% approval in ratings.
:)
- orphaned at 18 with very little money - studied hard and ranked 15th in the entire country and got admitted to IIT - Got an MBA from Harvard - Worked at McKinsey till 2011 making to the the post of Managing Director (the first MD of McKinsey from outside US) - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajat_Gupta#Philanthropy]
See this Bloomberg article which pretty much says something similar - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-15/in-gupta-jurors-saw....
But I sense that we are different people, so arguing further with you will be moot.
Juror can say whatever they want to but the bottom line is is that when you in front of jury, they need to judge you based on your case merits, not whether you did or did not do something good or bad in your life. This is simple irrelevant to case in front of the judge.
Check the case of Casey Anthony, for example. She has been giving sleeping pills to her daughter while partying carelessly in the town. She is a bad person and was terrible mother, but yet importunately there was not enough evidence to sentence her. The jury judged based on evidence presented, not because whether she was a good or bad person. And I believe its a fair system. Otherwise one could have a spat with another and become a priest, teach and help people for 50 years, then blew his opponent head and be found not guilty because he did so many good things in his life. It doesnt work like that.
Whether he was orphan or not, studied to rank 15th or not is truly irrelevant. There is hundred million people throughout the modern world history in similar position than you never heard of (orphan, no parents, brilliant, good grades, etc). But the big different is that Gupta is a sentenced and convicted _criminal_ and they are not!
Further, I cannot compare Gupta's life to Hitler's, because the latter is dead, and Gupta is "not done yet", so its like comparing apples to oranges. But let's play this game. If we would jump into Time Machine and went back in time before September 1939, having the same conversation you would be beaten down by 90% of voters that were with Hitler. I don't know about you, but surely I wouldn't like to stand against 90% of population of a country like Germany. Probably by the end of day number 2, arguing with 90% of population you would be hanging on the pole with hands tighten behind your back. But I agree what happened next, that's a different story.
> But I sense that we are different people, so arguing further with you will be moot.
We all not that different, my friend. We all had the same grand-grand-parents.
Further, Hitler DID do a lot of good things in his lifetime, they are just typically outweighed by the massive amounts of evil he did later. If he's unable to see that even bad people can do good things, good people can do bad things, and that most people are just 'somewhere' in the middle (hopefully) trying to do more good things than bad, then I believe it is he who doesn't understand the notion of 'shades of gray'.