“It was always a BS charge.”
I don’t know why you write that. It seemed from the facts he was obviously guilty.
[I don’t know why you write that. It seemed from the facts he was obviously guilty.]
Second, the information has to be certain to result in a profit. For instance, some high-ranking official in a corporation tells you, at a time when then stock is trading at $10, that another company has offered to buy it out at $20. The moment that information becomes public, the stock is bound to rise materially.
Whereas even breaking information about pandemics (vs the non-breaking news nature of the briefing) has had no impact on financial markets. The past century has seen any number of new infectious diseases come on scene. MERS, SARS, Hong Kong flu, AIDS - all have come and gone without a ripple. SARS in particular killed thousands in China without actually doing much outside of it, let alone dent stock prices.
Just because you did not know something known to the markets before a government briefing and found out about it afterwards doesn’t meant you are guilty of insider trading. In this case, Burr was merely guilty of ignorance of something he wouldn’t normally be interested in, anyway. He would have been guilty of overreaction if the virus had turned out to be like SARS, which created similar problems at the outset, but only within China.
The markets started turning down only when Italians started dying in significant numbers. And that was when everyone realized that this wasn’t a virus lethal only because of Third World sanitary and health care standards. None of this was non-public information. In fact, it was a little too public - like a soap opera, with everyone hanging on to dramatic stories and watching numbers climb inexorably.