Securities Fraud

After reading about Belfort, I looked up the different kinds of scams lumped under securities fraud. What surprised me was that insider trading, Ponzi schemes, and corporate fraud (like setting up dummy corporations, or publishing false reports) are lumped together with Belfort's "pump and dump" scheme. This is interesting because it seems to me that the latter falls onto a spectrum of lies, lie-like statements, and exaggerations that are considered acceptable in the context of sales, marketing, and advertising. Something like a insider trading, on the other hand, falls under another category entirely, and has no more benign variant.

There is some dissonance in the economic and legal framework we use to describe lying as it relates to making money, because there needs to be some arbitrary line to demarcate how much exaggeration is acceptable in selling something. Belfort's lies are prosecuted as fraud, right alongside lies that seem to be in a very different category, like Bernie Madoff's lies. What does it say about our system of classifying economic lies when the highest form of success is being able to sell something (oftentimes through exaggeration), but exaggerating a bit too much means being relegated to the same bin as Ponzi schemers?

Something else I was thinking about is what a stock price represents, and to what extent Belfort's scheme was a lie, under the concept of economic lie that is prevalent in our society. Unlike Madoff's lies, where investors were lied to about how much return they were getting, Belfort lies only in the positive statements he makes about the companies. The price of the stock itself is not a lie - that is, the phrases "overvalued stock" or "manipulated stock prices" are not meaningful, because the financial construct of tradable securities inherently incorporates an element of what we consider a kind of lie. Specifically, with any security you have the ability to lie about how valuable you think it is based on the value, volume, rate, and time at which you trade.