Insider Trading
Law, Ethics, and Reform

Explains why the current US insider trading regime is inefficient and unjust, and offers a clear path to reform.

John P. Anderson (Author)

9781316603406, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 7 June 2018

274 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

'Overall, a smart … well-researched book that should be included in any literature review on the subject of financial crime or malfeasance, particularly as it is the first one to come along in some time devoted to scholarship rather than sensationalism.' L. L. Hansen, Choice

As long as insider trading has existed, people have been fixated on it. Newspapers give it front page coverage. Cult movies romanticize it. Politicians make or break careers by pillorying, enforcing, and sometimes engaging in it. But, oddly, no one seems to know what's really wrong with insider trading, or - because Congress has never defined it - exactly what it is. This confluence of vehemence and confusion has led to a dysfunctional enforcement regime in the United States that runs counter to its stated goals of efficiency and fairness. In this illuminating book, John P. Anderson summarizes the current state of insider trading law in the US and around the globe. After engaging in a thorough analysis of the practice of insider trading from the normative standpoints of economic efficiency, moral right and wrong, and virtue theory, he offers concrete proposals for much-needed reform.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Law: 1. Early development of insider trading law in the United States
2. Federal regulation and the modern era
3. The problem of vagueness in the law
4. Injustice, incoherence and irrationality – time for regime change
5. The global experience
Part II. Ethics: 6. From Cicero to Laidlaw: two thousand years of debate over the propriety of information asymmetries
7. The efficient, the right, the good, and legal reform
8. The economics of insider trading
9. Is insider trading morally wrong? 10. Greed, envy, and insider trading
Part III. Reform: 11. The path forward – an outline for reform
Index.

Subject Areas: Company law [LNCD], International criminal law [LBBZ], Law [L], Business ethics & social responsibility [KJG]