The jury’s conviction of Galleon’s Raj Rajaratnam on all 14 charges could be the turning point in the ever- recurring public and private debates on insider trading. The argument that it benefits the whole economy by forcing asset prices to adjust to reality looks a lot less appealing in the light of the courtroom exposures. What we see is a network of conspiracy to get rich quick more pervasive than previously imagined. The sheer volume of obscure figures in the financial world with access to lucrative tips and an inclination to sell them was astonishing: not the audacity of hope, but the audacity of greed.

Mr Rajaratnam, thought of as a Wall Street billionaire success story, could not find it in himself to stop trading off significant non-public information in more than a dozen companies. His approach was one of “getting the number”, that is, exploiting insider information before it became public to trade ahead of public announcements on earnings, forecasts, mergers and spin-offs. As one of the trial witnesses put it: “Research is sort of like doing your homework ahead of time. Getting the number is more like cheating on the test.”

His competitors had long-admired what seemed to be a deep set of contacts that he had cultivated inside Silicon Valley executive suites and on Wall Street trading floors. But they enabled him to build a vast network of information based on betrayals of corporate trust by people he seduced. As the prosecutor put it: “Cheating became part of his business model.”