Galleon hedge fund’s owner Raj Rajaratnam was charged with insider trading. It paid around $250 million to its banks this decade. Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) were Galleon’s foremost hedge-fund service providers.

Galleon’s short term trading strategies had it pay huge amounts to banks. Its employees also had to remain in close contact with salespersons and traders at Wall Street. Large buy and sell orders, important market developments and discussions on “one page sellers” of shares became common place with its officials, all such information sharing prohibited by the bank policies.

As a Goldman Sachs executive rightly puts it, “They cared about short-term returns and cared a lot about the impact of their trading and the costs. They expected a lot of market information.” But a leak of corporate information seems to be more of a reason for prosecution than is market information sharing. The case

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I happen to spend my summers in Norway. I was quite amazed at the amount of negative response received from European posters on the ECB post. I still believe the ECB is making a mistake. Granted, the ECB is dealing with a host of issues the FED does not have, such as, semi-rigid labor markets. I still believe the ECB’s target and potential slavish adherence with keeping to an inflation target will cause a lot of unnecessary pain to the Euro zone. Yes, I am in the “this inflation is transitory” camp. However, the last few days have seen an orchestrated move in several central bank policies. Most notably, the ECB is telegraphing the potential to raise its rates. The Bank of Canada did not cut rates. India has raised rates. China is making moves to drain liquidity from its system. ...