The possibility that something like this happened is pretty obvious to anyone who understands how the sausage is made on Wall Street. Yes, people can and do con

The possibility that something like this happened is pretty obvious to anyone who understands how the sausage is made on Wall Street. Yes, people can and do conspire behind the scenes whether it's illegal or not. Yes, insider trading occurs. Yes, certain actors have many orders of magnitude more money under their control than others. And yes there is now a much higher volume of computerized trading than in decades past, with more complexity, more abstraction, and more layers of indirection. It's like running a shell game against a mark, except you're now able to maintain thousands of shells under which to hide the nut as you move it around. And move them at extremely high speeds. If you plan a con or scam or "raid" but construct it well enough to cover your trail, have plausible deniability, and/or not do anything which is strictly illegal (and if you have millions or especially billions of dollars at your disposal, you almost certainly can afford to have many great lawyers helping you to ensure that this is the case), then it seems reasonable to assume that one can get away with the white-collar equivalent of a bank robbery.