It’s Time for Obama to Bite the Hedge-Fund Sharks

There’s nothing like a good insider-dealing story, and this could be one of the biggest since Rudy Giuliani, then an aggressive young U.S. attorney on the make, took down Ivan Boesky twenty-five years ago. The man in the dock is Mathew Martoma, a little-known thirty-eight-year-old hedge-fund trader who stands accused of generating two hundred and seventy-six million dollars by trading in the stocks of two health-care companies on the basis of information supplied by a neurologist involved in a clinical trial of a new Alzheimer’s drug. But it is pretty clear that the prosecutors’ ultimate target is Martoma’s former boss: Steven A. Cohen, the founder and driving force of the eponymous S.A.C. Capital, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds.

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