Saturday, July 11, 2009

Goldman's unfair market play

A story came out this week that a worker at Goldman Sachs bank left for a new job but stole some code before leaving. The computer code that was stolen was for a computer program full of math algorithms that was used by Goldman to trade stocks. Two things are very interesting about this story.
The first is that Goldman called up the Justice Department to have the theif arrested because he would have an unfair advantage in the stock market by having this computer program. Yet Bloomberg news' Jonathan Weil asks, why is Goldman not getting any flack for having this unfair advantage to begin with? So only investment banks are legally allowed to have unfair market advantage.

Second is that this man was arrested within 48 hours of Goldman Sachs calling in the crime to the Justice Department. Talk about pull in the government. How long would it take for our calls to no even be acted on but just listened to?

No comments: