All of this rumination is not intended to serve as a defense of Wall Street’s practices. It’s intended to argue that trying to insure that information disseminated by Wall Street is both accurate and generally available is a fool’s errand. Accurate information is valuable, and therefore expensive. You can police the margins – and those margins may well have been crossed in this case – but the problem in intrinsic to the fact that information asymmetries arise naturally all the time, and information asymmetries are the main way people make money.
