Zachary Karabell has a piece up at the Huffington Post making some points worth listening to about the Galleon-Gupta "insider trading" situation. among them:
In part, all of this is the fallout of a culture looking for villains for the financial crisis. As Charles Ferguson, director of the documentary Inside Job said in accepting his Academy Award, no financial executive has gone to jail for their role in the financial meltdown, and in his view, that is wrong. But is it? Generals routinely mess up during war, either from incompetence, vanity, arrogance or simply the unexpected. They are recalled and sacked, we hope, but unless it can be shown that they willfully and purposely screwed up, they are in our society rarely see a court-martial. Financial executives were culpable in myriad decisions that led to the financial crisis, but that in itself does not translate into prosecution and jail time.