Slashdot Mirror
On Wall Street, a High-Ranking Few Still Avoid Email (reuters.com)
The world may be increasingly becoming digital, but a small group of the Wall Street elite refuses to say anything substantive in an email, text, or chat, and some will not communicate digitally at all. From a Reuters report: This group, which includes top bankers like JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and powerful investors like Carl Icahn and Berkshire Hathaway Inc's Warren Buffett, were eschewing electronic communications long before the probe of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails and the recent hacks of her campaign manager's account made headlines. Some on Wall Street are nostalgic for a time when in-person conversations or phone calls were the norm, but others believe the words they type and send can come back to haunt them. Prosecutors have built insider trading, mortgage fraud and rate-rigging cases on embarrassing emails over the past several years, and they are often the most memorable part. Recent email woes among Washington power players have provided yet another reason for bankers to try to protect private correspondence from prying eyes. Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you."
Where I work, sometimes you want it on-the-record. I want proof I said something, or did something, far more often than I'd ever want to be able to deny such actions later on.
I'm betting this policy of theirs predates email... it was probably already in place back when written/dictated letters were the norm.
On a related note, I work with someone who follows a similar practice. I've figured out she will call me if she doesn't want something on record. She's not a higher up... more of a not-completely-trustworthy coworker who relies on unsubstantiated appeals to authority as a stick. If she can't reach me by phone, she'll wait until she can catch me in person. With her, I've learned to follow up on any verbal exchanges with an email asking for clarification/elucidation - basically forcing the conversation into a more-auditable mode.
#DeleteChrome
You are completely right of course.
That being said, I would add that if you're Warren Buffet, you're going to have everyone try to impress you with unsolicited insider trading knowledge. So that's another reason you wouldn't want a work email address for him.
Because what happens when you receive insider information by email about a company you were already going to invest in? If the inside information only confirms that you should buy their stock, do you cancel your original plan to buy their stock now because you would seem guilty of insider trading? Or do you stick to the original plan of buying the stock and try to prove to the Feds that you didn't make the buying decision using the information you received?
I had an uncle who was prosecuted for insider trading maybe 10 years ago. He was on the board of a multi-billion dollar international merger. They didn't have any emails or anything like that and they didn't need it (sadly, system is screwed up). He had the best lawyers money could buy too. He wasn't a poor man by any stretch of the imagination.
What they had were phone logs and his business colleague's testimony who had supposedly received the insider tip and who had bought stock.
So the way this works is they let the person who they accuse of having received the insider information off the hook in exchange for testifying against the person who they claim gave the information.
Do you see a problem with that? I do. There was zero evidence other than that from a compromised source that can't be trusted to provide non-biased testimony. The reason it is biased is because the source is exchanging testimony against the accused for a lenient sentence (ie no jail time). It doesn't matter if my uncle didn't do the crime because they've given incentive to another to testify that he did.
They were basically just going to demonstrate that my uncle communicated (phone call records) around the same time my uncle's business colleague made a buy totally ignoring the other logs that showed they communicated regularly. An intelligent person would realize it is completely plausible and likely that it was all a coincidence.
Juries and judges put people to death all the time based on such coincidental "evidence" and blackmailed testimony. And don't give me that non-sense about how one can get up on the stand and testify that the crime didn't happen. They throw people in jail for doing that when they don't believe them and of course they don't believe them if they don't side with the prosecutor's story. The people being made to testify know what they have to say without being told what to say.
Our system is f'd.
I should also point out that they accused my uncle's brother of receiving insider info too. They dropped his case only because he had kept detailed written logs of his trading and they didn't want to lose at trial. If the logs had been introduced as evidence at trial it would have been apparent his trades were not based on insider info at all. Rather it was based on public information which is allowed. I'm not sure exactly what these logs might have included, but I guess they were notes detailing public info that would have demonstrated what he was taking into account during his decisions to trade on these and other unrelated stocks. I don't think it's something most people would have had so most people would have ended up serving time had they been accused despite being innocent.