{"id":22852,"date":"2014-12-21T00:32:09","date_gmt":"2014-12-20T23:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/?p=22852"},"modified":"2014-12-21T19:57:09","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T18:57:09","slug":"22852","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/22852\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of Information Symmetry?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Who owns the lawmakers and the courts?\u00a0 Symmetry of information, also known as a &#8216;level playing field,&#8217; is the cornerstone and underlying principle of US Securities laws since 1933.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;Information symmetry is a condition in which all relevant information is known to all parties involved. For example, in the stock market, stock information has a full public disclosure, and all investors are in the same position to share information.&#8221; &#8220;In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case. Examples of this problem are adverse selection, moral hazard, and information monopoly.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The letter of the law can be twisted hard enough to find a reason for excusing some particularly blatant insider trading.\u00a0 As long as the exchanging of favors is sufficiently soft and undocumented, and not the explicit exchange of cash, videotaped and posted to Youtube, it&#8217;s all good.\u00a0 The purpose of information symmetry is to prevent certain market actors from engaging in control frauds. This principle taken to a perfect and natural ideal was a cornerstore of one of the great economic canards that justified deregulating the markets.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&#8220;In finance, the <em>efficient-market hypothesis<\/em> asserts that financial markets are &#8216;informationally efficient&#8217;. In consequence of this, one cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average market returns on a risk-adjusted basis, given the information available at the time the investment is made.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Information symmetry means that some analyst or CEO cannot tell his friends that they are going to give downward guidance in a week, so that they can all sell their stock and even short it ahead of the public.<\/p>\n<p>It means that the most powerful players in the market cannot traffic in private knowledge, presenting two sorts of datastreams, one for the public and one for themselves<\/p>\n<p>This decision will probably be reversed, because otherwise there can be no confidence in US markets any longer.\u00a0 No one who is not an insider can believe in their impartiality and honesty. They are worse than any casino, because the dealer can signal some of the players when he has an ace in the hole.<\/p>\n<p>The most rational response from the rest of the world will be to shun US markets, and take steps to prevent the contagion of this abuse of privilege.<\/p>\n<p>This is the kind of situation where the locker room talk at the Country Club gets leaked out in public, and the Very Important People who do it are suddenly exposed for exactly who and what they really are, and what they really believe.\u00a0 It is a\u00a0 brave new world if this decision stands.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Disrupting-Information-Symmetry.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-22861\" src=\"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Disrupting-Information-Symmetry-300x222.jpg\" alt=\"Disrupting Information Symmetry\" width=\"300\" height=\"222\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Disrupting-Information-Symmetry-300x222.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Disrupting-Information-Symmetry.jpg 356w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who owns the lawmakers and the courts?\u00a0 Symmetry of information, also known as a &#8216;level playing field,&#8217; is the cornerstone and underlying principle of US Securities laws since 1933. &#8220;Information symmetry is a condition in which all relevant information is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/22852\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22852"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22863,"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22852\/revisions\/22863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}