Last week, The Times revealed that a contractor working for the Bank of England had secretly supplied an audio feed to hedge funds so that they could cash in on the governor’s market-moving words. It seemed scandalous — a security breach at one of the country’s most closely guarded institutions to give a few traders a head start on the rest of the market — but perhaps the most scandalous element of the story was that, plausibly, nobody broke any rules. What motivated the network of rogue companies involved, and their interlinked directors, was speed. In the old days, before insider trading was outlawed in 1980, early information was about who you knew. Today, it is about how fast…

Source: The Times December 27, 2019 18:00 UTC