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again!” Rebecca can see the frustration on John’s face. “I know you won’t approve, but if the worst does happen I’m thinking that I’d like to give him some of the deposit money we’ve been saving up. Do you think that would be ok?”
    Steve is Rebecca’s big brother, and even though he’s also his best mate John is reluctant to risk the savings they’ve been jointly squirreling away for the last three years to put down as a deposit on a place of their own. They’ve been saving so hard, living in cheap, crummy rented flats like this one so they can afford to put money away and attempt at last get themselves onto the property market.
    â€œHe’s a grown man for goodness sake. I know we’re in a recession but he’s a skilled steelworker. If he loses his job I’m sure he’ll get another one pretty soon. We don’t have to pick him up and dust him down each time he takes a knock. -And I think you mean ‘loan-him’ not ‘give-him’ don’t you?”
    â€œOk, you’re probably right, but let’s keep it as an option, just in case the worst happens…”
    John can’t look into her big, brown eyes without softening. He takes a slug of his cold beer and changes the subject, “So apart from that, you’re having more of the usual problems at work then?”
    Rebecca Kavanagh is a senior data analyst in the Financial Services Authority at its headquarters in Canary Wharf. The FSA was set up in the year 2000 to regulate financial services in the UK, taking the function away from The Bank of England by Act of Parliament. It’s funded from levies on the firms that it oversees and regulates, which include things like banks, stockbrokers, fund managers and financial advisors.
    Rebecca is the team leader of a small group of analysts in an FSA department tackling market abuse (known to everyone else as ‘insider dealing’ or ‘insider trading’). Market abuse includes buying shares in a company with inside knowledge about, let’s say, a forthcoming takeover. It also covers creating a false or misleading impression in order to drive up (or down) the price of shares to a distorted level. As the law stands you can’t be sent to prison for market abuse. The ‘worst’ that can happen is that you face unlimited fines and/or public censure (an official public announcement of industry misconduct i.e. name and shame). –Something that’s proving about as effective as an ashtray on a motorbike. The risk and reward for this white collar crime is completely out of balance when compared to a ‘working class’ crime such as physically robbing money off someone, for which you could be sent to prison for three years or more.
    The FSA have been wholly ineffective at tackling insider dealing compared to the American equivalent, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who rack up huge numbers of convictions each year to their credit.
    In the whole of 2006 the FSA only managed 109 enforcement actions. It also received much criticism for not forecasting the 2008 international financial crisis. The FSA’s excuse for not having seen it coming was that it had always believed that the markets were self-correcting, and that the leaders of businesses were better at assessing risk than any regulator. Additionally, because the FSA focuses on individual companies rather than the banking industry as a whole it had failed to see that risk-taking had become excessive across the board and thereby had been unsuccessful in seeing the impending disastrous breakdown of confidence in banking which in the UK started with the collapse of Northern Rock in 2007. Although working at the FSA has its upsides, right now the morale in the organisation is at a pretty low ebb because of their continued in-built ineptitude at tackling market abuse effectively.
    John’s heard all Rebecca’s complaints about