Employees in the unit, known as the Product Management Group, appear to have tipped off clients and traders about the content of the firm's research reports before they were released, a former Lehman analyst said.
In previous generations, however, China and India themselves were closed economies, so overseas Chinese and Indian traders had to content themselves with linking foreign ports to each other (the Chinese in South-East Asia, for example, and the Indians in parts of Africa).
History might have worked out rather more agreeably had traders and travelers been content to stick with Waghorn and his Overland Route, fine French wines and all.
Traders seem to be content that central banks will maintain their stimulus measures for a while longer.
Most likely, free traders will have to content themselves with regional agreements for the time being; unfortunate given the extent to which openness has fueled economic gains in the developed and developing world.UPDATE: Douglas Irwin and Petros C. Mavroidis comment at VoxEU.
But free-traders are far from content.
The agency will now require firms to create firewalls that prevent, say, a derivatives trader from influencing the content of the firm's derivatives industry research.
Spartz calls himself an aggregator, but he is more like a day trader, investing in pieces of content that seem poised to go viral.
The idea is that as traders buy and sell shares in competing content, the cream will float to the top where entertainment-industry bosses can skim it off.
Even the news organizations themselves are in on it, developing support tools so traders can more quickly mine their news content to make trades.
