Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society

The Enforcement Division: A History

The Reagan Era and Insider Trading, 1980 - 1990

Inside the Insider Trading Campaign

The campaign against insider trading faced a series of hurdles. The legal theories were still unsettled; while corporate insiders were clearly not allowed to use inside information to trade on their own companies’ stock, it was less clear when the ban applied to non-insiders. In cases in the early 1980s, the Supreme Court rejected theories that would have applied insider trading prohibitions to almost anyone in possession of nonpublic information. In 1980, in Chiarella, the Court overturned a criminal conviction for insider trading because prosecutors did not show a “relationship of trust and confidence” between the trader and stockholders from whom he bought shares.(1) In Dirks, a 1983 case, it held that someone trading on nonpublic information received from an insider – a “tippee” – would have violated the law only if it was shown that the provider of the information – the “tipper” received a personal benefit.(2) The Commission’s 1980 adoption of Rule 14e-3, which barred insider trading related to a tender offer, helped, but not until the 1990s would the Supreme Court clarify the law by embracing the “misappropriation theory” of insider trading.(3)

John Fedders, 1981
John Fedders, 1981

Weak remedies – a bane of the Commission – also made it difficult to prevent insider trading. Into the 1980s, the civil penalty for insider trading was at most an injunction and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, the equivalent of requiring a defendant to “put the cookies back in the cookie jar.”(4) At one point, Fedders conceded the biggest deterrent to insider trading was “the personal embarrassment one suffers by the adverse publicity.”(5) Only in 1984 did growing public awareness lead Congress to adopt the Insider Trader Sanctions Act, which among other things empowered district courts to impose a sanction of up to three times wrongful profits gained, or losses avoided, for illegal tipping or trading.(6)

Despite this, the staff still battled insider trading with its characteristic tenacity. When insider trading moved abroad, the SEC extended its reach. In 1981 staffers identified likely insider trading ahead of takeover announcements for St. Joe Minerals and Santa Fe International. In both cases, however, the trading had occurred through Swiss bank accounts, and the banks refused to disclose the identity of those accounts’ owners, citing Swiss bank secrecy law.(7) The staff quickly struck back by persuading a Federal judge to levy “massive fines” against one of the banks and threatened to bar it from U.S. markets.(8) Within days the bank folded and identified the account holders, and inside a year Swiss and U.S. authorities had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) providing the SEC new access to information about foreign account holders, an agreement that would be replicated with other nations over the next decade.(9)

Such cases were never the whole, or even the majority, of the Division’s work during the 1980s. Accounting fraud, broker-dealer misconduct, and penny stock fraud all remained areas that consumed much of its time and resources.(10) That said, it was insider trading that caught the public’s eye and Enforcement attorneys’ interest. As Fedders recalled, all the junior attorneys “wanted to have one insider trading case among the cases they were investigating.”(11)


Previous Next

Footnotes:

(1) Chiarella v United States, 445 US 222 (1980).

(2) Dirks v SEC, 463 US 646 (1983).

(3) Pitt & Shapiro, Regulation by Enforcement: 206.

(4) Id. at 210 n. 260.

(5) Kenneth B. Noble, Insider Cases and the SEC, NYT Jan 25, 1983: 60.

(6) Pitt & Shapiro, Regulation by Enforcement: 223.

(7) Vise & Coll, Eagle on the Street: 53-55.

(8) Banks Can’t Invoke Secrecy Laws, Federal Judge Rules, Wall St. J. Nov. 17, 1981: 24.

(9) SEC Annual Report 1983: 2.

(10) John Fedders oral history: 12; SEC Annual Report 1988: 2, 4.

(11) Fedders oral history: 12.

Related Museum Resources

Papers

April 12, 1982
image pdf (Courtesy of the estate of John R. Evans; made possible through a gift from Quinton F. Seamons)
October 19, 1982
image pdf (Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library)
December 30, 1982
image pdf (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
January 31, 1983
image pdf (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
March 3, 1983
image pdf (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
April 4, 1983
image pdf (Thurgood Marshall Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
May 29, 1983
image pdf (Harry A. Blackmun Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
June 1983
image pdf (Harry A. Blackmun Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
June 10, 1983
image pdf (Thurgood Marshall Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
June 27, 1983
image pdf (Harry A. Blackmun Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
June 28, 1983
image pdf (Thurgood Marshall Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
June 28, 1983
image pdf (Harry A. Blackmun Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
July 8, 1983
image pdf (Harry A. Blackmun Papers, courtesy Library of Congress)
October 21, 1988
transcript pdf (Courtesy of David S. Ruder)
October 21, 1988
transcript pdf (Courtesy of David S. Ruder)
November 30, 1988
image pdf (Courtesy of David S. Ruder)
December 14, 1988
image pdf (Courtesy of David S. Ruder)
January 18, 1989
transcript pdf (Courtesy of David S. Ruder)
February 3, 1989
image pdf (Courtesy of David S. Ruder)
Late 1990s
document pdf (Courtesy of Carl Schneider)

Photos

April 5, 1942
(With permission of AP/Wide World Photos )

Oral Histories

13 January 2011

Frank Easterbrook

February 11, 2020

Donald C. Langevoort

Donald C. Langevoort is the Thomas Aquinas Reynolds Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He joined the Georgetown faculty in 1999 after eighteen years at Vanderbilt University School of Law. Professor Langevoort graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1976, and went into private practice with the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington. In 1978, he joined the staff of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission as Special Counsel in the Office of the General Counsel. Since entering academia in 1981, Professor Langevoort has written a treatise on insider trading, co-authored a casebook on securities regulation, and produced numerous law review articles on topics such as insider trading, the impact of technology on securities regulation, investor behavior and the intersection between cognitive psychology and lawyers’ professional responsibilities.

13 June 2005

Michael Mann

14 July 2006

John Sturc

Permission for Use

The virtual museum and archive is copyrighted by the SEC Historical Society. The Society reserves the right to restrict access to or use of the museum by any user at any time.

Users are prohibited from sharing or downloading any material for publication or commercial purposes without written permission from the Executive Director. Requests for permission must be submitted by email and specify the material requested and for what purpose.

Material used with the Society's permission should be credited to: www.sechistorical.org.