Law Commons^™

The Lost History Of Insider Trading, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

Common conceptions about the history of insider trading norms in the United States are inaccurate and incomplete. In his landmark 1966 book Insider Trading and the Stock Market, Dean Henry Manne depicted a world in which insider trading was both widespread and universally accepted. It was SEC enforcement efforts in the early 1960s, he contended, that swayed public opinion to condemn what had previously been considered a natural and unobjectionable market feature. For five decades, the legal academy has largely accepted Manne’s historical description, and the vigorous debates over whether the federal government should prosecute insider trading have assumed, …