Word: walls
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...outright) and created the Securities and Exchange Commission to enhance market oversight. As the stock market expanded in the 1960s, the SEC grew more aggressive in fighting insider trading, relying on a general prohibition against securities fraud. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that a former Wall Street Journal reporter, R. Foster Winans, and two associates were guilty of mail and wire fraud for trading on names mentioned in upcoming editions of the newspaper's "Heard on the Street" columns. Winans was sentenced to 18 months in prison, although the court split on whether his actions also constituted illegal insider...
...1980s were a monument to Wall Street excess, witnessing some of the most notorious insider-trading prosecutions in history. Corporate raider Ivan Boesky - said to be an inspiration for the fictional Gordon ("Greed ... is good") Gekko, villain of the Oliver Stone film Wall Street - was sentenced to 3½ years in prison and fined $100 million in 1986 for insider trading. Financier Michael Milken, the "junk-bond king" who famously earned $550 million in 1987, avoided prosecution on similar charges by pleading guilty to other criminal counts. But the largest insider-trading conviction came two decades later, in 2007, when...
These days, you don't have to work on Wall Street to get entangled in an insider-trading scandal - just ask Martha Stewart. The homemaking guru spent five months in prison in 2004 after a series of events triggered by her sale of $228,000 in shares of biomedical firm ImClone Systems, the day before its value plunged 15%. Thanks to a 1997 Supreme Court ruling, even those who lack a connection to a company cannot trade on inside information if they know it is meant to remain confidential. (ImClone was run by Stewart's friend, Sam Waksal.) Ultimately, Stewart...
...fall of the Berlin wall caught the world by surprise. For months, East Germany's beleaguered communist rulers had tried in vain to silence a growing opposition movement and stem the tide of people pouring out of the country. On the night of Nov. 9, 1989, an East German official held a press conference to announce new government travel policies but inadvertently announced that crossings to the West would be opened "without delay." Within hours, thousands of East Berliners began lining up at checkpoints near the Wall. At first the border guards tried to check passports, but they quickly realized...
...said in an interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson that night. "I believed in all my heart it was in the future." Two years earlier, Reagan had addressed a crowd of some 20,000 near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. At the time, even his closest advisers dismissed the notion as far-fetched. "It's a great speech line," Reagan's National Security Adviser, Frank Carlucci, remembers thinking. "But it will never happen." When the Wall came down, however, Reagan's speech entered American lore. "You look for one line...