It’s not unusual for governments to share market sensitive information with key financial players who may want to adjust their portfolios ahead of certain policy announcements. As a fresh arrival in Asia in the early 1990s my moral compass was often dismissed as being not in sync with the way “markets worked” and that I better get used to Asia's huge number of “unusually wealthy businessmen” who were actually the ones that created the wealth of opportunities for western businesses. And in a way they definitely did, as I had the pleasure of restructuring one of these unusually wealthy men’s billion dollar debt after his friends in the department of finance failed to inform that the markets would start shorting the Thai Baht. He had always believed his government sources would inform him if something were to go amiss and as it turned out, this was a highly questionable insurance policy. Sometimes market forces do prevail.

Anyway, the one western nation where we can probably find a comparable level of government interference in the market place is Canada where another scandal is about to be unveiled, right at the start of a new election campaign:

As federal politicians prepare to hit the campaign trail, the Conservatives and NDP are calling for investigations of alleged insider trading arising from tax policy announcements by Finance Minister Ralph Goodale.

The Tories said Sunday they are writing to the Ontario Securities Commission to demand an inquiry, while the New Democrats want the matter turned over to the RCMP. At issue are events last Wednesday, when there was a spike in trading in income trust units amid speculation that Mr. Goodale was going to change the tax rules that applied to them.

NOTE: Ginna Dowler – who will have to keys to Peaktalk for the Christmas holidays as guestblogger – analyzed some highly unusual trading patterns and there’s more over at Kate McMillan’s. Stay tuned, the general election campaign is – absent any issues that politicians really dare talking about – going to be a nasty and empty debate that will focus almost entirely on scandals.