I will just sit here and hold my breath, waiting for hedge fund execs like Steve Cohen to go to jail:
Federal authorities announced a raft of criminal charges on Thursday against SAC Capital, the hedge fund run by the billionaire Steven A. Cohen, an unusually aggressive move that could cripple one of Wall Street’s most successful stock trading firms.
In the 41-page indictment that includes four counts of securities fraud and one count of wire fraud, prosecutors charged the fund and its units with carrying out a broad insider trading scheme between 1999 and 2010. The case seeks to attribute certain criminal acts of employees to the company itself, claiming that the fund “enabled and promoted” the illicit behavior.
The problems at SAC, according to the indictment, partly stemmed from a breakdown in internal controls — and ethics. The indictment cited “an institutional indifference” to wrongdoing that “resulted in insider trading that was substantial, pervasive and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.”
The case, announced by federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. in Manhattan, is the culmination of an investigation that spanned a decade. As the federal government mounted a relentless crackdown against insider trading, an investigation that reached into corporate board rooms and Wall Street trading floors, it zeroed in on SAC as a central target.
” on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.”
Now had they indicted Cohen they might have found some precedents in the bargaining process.