Something smells out on the street – and we’re talking Wall Street.
While others dismiss it, there’s something rotten going on around the merger of Torchlight Energy Resources and MetaMaterials and the short selling of stock shares that were never meant to hit the market. Investment houses such as Fidelity and Black Rock walked away whole while thousands of ordinary investors got hosed.
Join Greg and Rob Long as they’re glad to see Elon Musk becoming the largest shareholder of Twitter and they analyze how it will shake up the social media landscape. They also cover the Biden Administration’s decision to rescind the “Remain in Mexico” policy which would more than double the number of illegal immigrants entering America each month. And Vice President Kamala Harris struggles with boilerplate Democrat talking points in an interview with BET, adding to the lengthy list of verbal mishaps that have plagued her term.
Join Jim and Greg as they assess the newest poll on the Florida governor’s race that shows Ron DeSantis with a solid lead. They also cheer as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser drops the vaccine and mask mandates amid economic pressure and low COVID numbers. And Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm refuses to answer questions about her stock holdings because, “The planet is warming faster than ever”.
Lots of Friday fun on today’s Three Martini Lunch! Join Jim and Greg as they celebrate the Dow Jones crossing 29,000 for the first time on Friday and enjoy an economy that is staying stronger than many experts predicted. They also slam Pete Buttigieg for suggesting the doomed Ukrainian airliner was “caught in the middle of an unnecessary and unwanted military tit for tat” instead of simply stating that it was shot down by Iran. And they dissect the stunning news that Tom Steyer is suddenly in second place among Democrats in South Carolina.
This past week, the United States Supreme Court heard oral argument in Salman v. United States, an important case concerning federal securities law. At issue are the limitations placed on insiders who trade in the shares of companies on the basis of material, nonpublic information. The parties covered are not only those who obtain the information themselves, but the persons to whom they (as “tippers”) pass on that information, commonly called tippees.
The prohibition on insider trading is said to derive from Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which makes it unlawful for any person to “employ any device, scheme, or artifice, to defraud,” as implemented under SEC Rule 10b-5. The purpose of this prohibition on insider trading is to restore overall investor confidence in the exchange markets, by denying to certain insiders the ability to reap undue benefit because of the informational advantage from undisclosed information that they gain against their actual or potential trading partners.
The extension of Rule 10b-5 to insider trading only took place in 1962 in the critical SEC decision In Re Cady, Roberts, & Co., and it has been long surrounded by controversy. Salman concerns whether, under Rule 10b-5, the tipper of the inside information had to receive some tangible benefit from the tippee, or whether some more diffuse social benefit sufficed to trigger criminal liability.
