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Oh, big whoop. The inside traders shouldn't be the biggest priority. I want the bastards who designed the system that stole people's homes and crashed the economy ... and bought off enough politicians to get away with it. It wasn't a crime of individuals, it was widespread and systemic mortgage banking fraud against ordinary people, and it ruined their lives and everyone else's at the bottom of the heap.
Bankers are like gremlins—you water one, and another hundred of them take its place. You have to strike at the root, not chip around the edges:
NEW YORK — The federal government took down the biggest Wall Streeter yet in its battle against insider trading: Rajat Gupta, a former director of Goldman Sachs who once headed powerful consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Gupta's conviction on securities fraud and conspiracy charges in federal court in Manhattan on Friday may embolden government efforts to weed out white-collar corruption using wiretaps, tools traditionally used against mobsters and gangsters.
"It's a cat-and-mouse game," said Michael Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor who represents clients facing white-collar investigations. "This is just the latest example of the feds being one step ahead."
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have scored 62 convictions in the 68 insider-trading cases since 2009, following a sweeping FBI investigation into illicit information trafficking called Perfect Hedge. The FBI has even enlisted actor Michael Douglas, who played the fictional crooked financier Gordon Gekko in the 1980s movie "Wall Street," to star in a commercial aimed at deterring insider trader.
[...] Gupta, 63, faces a maximum of 65 years in prison for three counts of securities fraud and a fourth of conspiracy. His was the highest-profile conviction since that of fallen hedge fund titan Raj Rajaratnam, to whom Gupta was accused of feeding secret information.
