Scoops about lawmaker impact of investments is nothing new

Jack Shafer of Reuters writes about the folly of those who are now investigating how a political intelligence group was able to report to its clients about new Medicare policy, allowing its customers to buy up publicly traded health care stocks before others got the news.

Shafer writes, “Obscure, untraceable people talking to people they know or don’t know, gathering information from congressional or agency sources, asking questions that appear to be innocent but turn out to be valuable to businessmen. Say, doesn’t that sound a lot like what the financial press does every nanosecond of every minute of every hour around the world? Isn’t this what we call … journalism, as practiced by the reporters at the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CQ, financial newsletters, CNBC, Fortune, Businessweek, business news sites and elsewhere? Not to mention the pricey financial information vended through the Bloomberg terminal or from my mother company, Thomson Reuters.

“Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Weil arrived at a similar conclusion in early April as the ‘scandal’ was just revealing itself, describing the 75-word note Height Securities analyst Justin Simon sent to his company’s clients as an’“amazing scoop.’

“‘Maybe someone told Simon something without permission, but that wouldn’t be the analyst’s problem,’ wrote Weil. ‘Journalists get stories all the time by sweet-talking people into blabbing things they shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

“There’s been nothing wrong with it for five or six centuries, as Chris Roush’s 2006 history of business journalism, Profits and Losses: Business Journalism and Its Role in Society, informs us. The earliest business journalism from the 15th and 16th centuries pushed both financial data and political intelligence to readers, Roush writes. Acting quickly on government news has always been lucrative, he points out in an interview, citing a favorite historical example: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s January 1790 decision to reorganize the young country’s debt and ‘refund the existing debt at face value,’ as he words it in his book. Informed investors boarded ships bound for Southern states to beat the news trickling down by land. Once they arrived in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, they reaped windfall profits by purchasing debt at 10 percent to 20 percent of face value from the unsuspecting. Roush shrugs his shoulders at the Height Securities story. ‘This is nothing new, this is using information to make money in the market,’ he told me.”

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