The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

You steal from uninformed investors all over the world, a few pennies or dollars at a time. The damage fans out evenly across a vast geography, and it’s hard to see. It’s because of this that lots of Wall Street people genuinely think of insider trading and naked short selling as victimless crimes. People get hurt, sure, but the victims are mostly sophisticated investors who should know better, and it’s not like you’re hitting them in the head with a brick or anything. It’s not a real crime. At least it doesn’t look like one. That may once have been true. But in the Fairfax case, the principals in this “victimless” scheme started to mimic the gangster aesthetic. Like most privileged, overeducated Americans who try it, they would suck at being real tough guys. They tried, however, and here’s the crazy thing: in a city where police in some neighborhoods define crime as standing on the sidewalk the wrong way, these idiots took their stock-trading act-like-a-thug life, screwed it up a hundred different ways, and not only couldn’t get arrested, they couldn’t even get police of any kind to notice.