19 February 2011

Is Rolling Stone Finance Coverage Better than the PBS NewsHour?

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics:

"The pattern of inaction toward shady deals on Wall Street grew worse and worse after Turner left, with one slam-dunk case after another either languishing for years or disappearing altogether. Perhaps the most notorious example involved Gary Aguirre, an SEC investigator who was literally fired after he questioned the agency's failure to pursue an insider-trading case against John Mack, now the chairman of Morgan Stanley and one of America's most powerful bankers.

Aguirre joined the SEC in September 2004. Two days into his career as a financial investigator, he was asked to look into an insider-trading complaint against a hedge-fund megastar named Art Samberg. One day, with no advance research or discussion, Samberg had suddenly started buying up huge quantities of shares in a firm called Heller Financial. 'It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller,' Aguirre recalls. 'And he wasn't just buying shares — there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day.' A few weeks later, Heller was bought by General Electric — and Samberg pocketed $18 million."