The Laws of Physics

Einstein's Notes

The way to make money is to get an information edge.  Apparently some enterprising traders have found a way of making communications travel faster than the speed of light.  Last week the Federal Reserve Bank's Open Market Committee decided not to start the tapering-off of its $85 billion a month of government securities and mortgages purchasing (aka "quantatative easing").  This was an unexpected decision and thus a bond-market moving piece of news. There are supposedly strict rules to keep this information from leaking out and giving traders an edge.  It is quite apparent that these rules had somehow been circumvented ... and not for the first time.  For the details see: USA Today Story.

The reason it is clear that this breach occurred was that, if it weren't, the communications between New York and Chicago must have traveled faster than the speed of light.  Such "front trading" totaled hundreds of millions of dollars ... reaping millions of dollars of profits for these unknown miscreants. It doesn't seem to me that it would be too difficult to get to the bottom of who these cheaters were ... if the powers-to-be in Washington really wanted to do so.  That is, of course, pretty much depends upon the size of the political donations that have been received from said cheaters ... or the degree of interlocking directorships that exists between the Fed and those trading parties who know how to defy the laws of physics.