Former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta has been charged in a new indictment for passing on insider information to Raj Rajaratnam, who is now in prison for eleven years for insider trading. At one point, Gupta left a Goldman board meeting to call Rajaratnam with privileged information about Goldman stock.
On Sept. 23, 2008, Gupta learned in a telephone meeting of the Goldman Sachs board that Berkshire Hathaway would make a $5 billion investment in the company.
According to the indictment, 16 seconds after disconnecting from the board meeting, Gupta was on the phone with Rajaratnam’s office. The call went through at 3:54 p.m. – six minutes before the stock market would close for the day.
Four minutes later, Rajaratnam bought 350,000 shares of Goldman.
This clearly shows the venal, corrupt nature of the 1%. Gupta doesn’t need the money. He’s already plenty wealthy. Yet he and too many others in his class believe they are above the law and can steal whatever they want.
The problem isn’t so much that we have an elite class but that our elite class is mostly amoral thugs and criminals.
Not to mention that when he sells his shares he only has to pay capital gains taxes and not ordinary income taxes. So there isn’t any real incentive for the 1% to actually create jobs. If the tax rates for regular income and capital gains taxes were switched you’d see the 1% fighting to get as many employees as they can, instead of fighting over shares of corporations.
It’s even worse than that. People who run hedge funds only pay 15% on their income.
The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored and we are a large part of why that has happened.