As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it in their editorial last Tuesday, nothing is stopping the
Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors from finding [regulatory] meaning in statutory penumbras.
Now the SEC is manufacturing a rule based on nothing but the æther in SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s mind. Gensler has hailed into court a pharmaceutical company employee for the “insider trading” crime of trading in options on the stock shares of another pharmaceutical company, a company about which the man had no insider information at all. Not a whit.