Gordon Crovitz has a characteristically shrewd Wall Street Journal column on how courts are rejecting Preet Bharara's prosecutorial campaign against "insider trading." Mr. Crovitz connects the problem to the SEC's Regulation FD, implemented in 2000. He writes: "As regulations made publicly available information scarce, the unintended consequence was huge incentives for hedge funds to root out company information they use privately for their trades."
There were plenty of misguided insider-trading prosecutions before Reg FD, as Mr. Crovitz knows because he wrote about them for the Journal back in the day. But he's probably correct that Reg FD has made things worse.
