We are in a new age; insider trading isn’t just the securities fraud violation various members of Congress have been caught committing — your coworkers are probably doing it too. There’s been a pick-up in the trend of folks who are making decisions with information they shouldn’t be privy to. Desperation to make an easy buck or one of the unexpected symptoms of Covid living? From WSJ:

“During Covid, there was an uptick in brazen conduct,” said Edward Imperatore, a defense lawyer at law firm Morrison & Foerster. “In a work-from-home environment, people acted with more impunity.”

There’s a way to read the increase in insider trading as “ah well, what can you do when you’re just hanging around each other all the time.” That is a bad way to read it. One of the traders actually bought a mouse jiggler to stop his girlfriend’s laptop from locking. That’s not happenstance — that’s premeditated. When someone goes that far out of their way to trade using private information at the expense of the public, they shouldn’t be getting slap-on-the-wrist treatment. That goes for the average person, but it is even more important when a person in a position of authority does this. I don’t know an exact number; let’s just eyeball it at 132 times more important:

Imperatore is right to characterize the post-Covid conduct as brazen, but it is harder to find a bolder instance of insider trading than a congressman not only trading serially, but going on to say that if Congress people weren’t allowed to do so that it would cut back on the amount of people who want to serve.

Love and Deceit: Work-From-Home Era Spawns ‘Pillow Talk’ Insider Trading [Wall Street Journal]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.