Raj Rajaratnam, billionaire founder of the Galleon Group, a major hedge fund, is led in handcuffs from FBI headquarters in New York on Friday, Oct.16, 2009. Rajaratnam was charged with insider trading in the stock of several companies including Hilton, Clearwire, and Google. (AP)

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This latest Wall Street story is ready-made for the big screen — insider trading cases as colorful and egregious as they come.

At the center, Galleon hedge fund chief Raj Rajaratnam, an outsized personality with a Rolodex spanning Silicon Valley and beyond. His counterpart — “Octopussy” — well, the name speaks for itself.

The cases unveil a world where everyone is after an edge. Where regulators are shut out. Where hot tips turn into huge windfalls. And where the difference between a tip and insider information can be a very blurry line.

This hour, On Point: big insider trading busts, and what they mean for the rest of us.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Gregory Zuckerman, a senior writer and columnist for The Wall Street Journal who has closely followed these insider trading cases. Read his recent coverage here and here. His new book, out this month, is “The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of how John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History.”

From Philadelphia, we’re joined by Arthur Laby, professor of law at Rutgers School of Law. Before joining the Rutgers faculty he served nearly ten years on the staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Also from New York, we’re joined by Richard Sylla, professor of economics and the history of financial institutions at New York University Stern School of Business. His books include “The American Capital Market” and “A History of Interest Rates.”

Author Katy Lederer

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“Money is a kind of poetry,” the great Wallace Stevens once wrote.

Lately, the great American money centers have looked, if anything, like tragic poetry. Meltdown. Mayhem. Fall from grace.

Katy Lederer was a poet in the belly of the beast — an Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad who for six years worked for one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. While they bet billions, she took notes — and wrote poetry.

Now, she’s quoting Goethe, Galbraith, Nietzsche and Kant from the land of leverage and the lush life.

This hour, On Point: The hedge-fund poet, and verse in the ruins of high finance.

You can join the conversation. Masters of the universe, did you find poetry in the bubble? In the billions? What do we learn when we open the books on money?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Katy Lederer joins us from Atlanta. She is the author of the poetry collections “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” and “Winter Sex,” and the memoir “Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.” She worked from 2002 to 2008 as a recruiter at D.E. Shaw, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. She is currently a poetry editor of Fence magazine, a literary and arts journal.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Here are two poems by Katy Lederer, from her new collection, “The Heaven-Sent Leaf”:

Me, a Brainworker

Me, a brainworker toiling in pristine white hallways.
Abnormal, aboriginal, endemic to this site.
Some people sell their wares outside.
In the pulsating light of Times Square they are singing.
In their noses and nipples, the glinting of rings.
Let us call them unoriginal.
Let us call them all these awful things.
The busy unoriginals are throwing out their trash,
But on this lovely parchment they are writing priceless poems.
They suppose that by such rendering they’ll be remembered after death.
They suppose that by such influence their souls will sing eternally.
In the hallways, we are killing time,
Its blood now thick and lurid on the freshly painted walls.

. . .

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-éclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

Let us think of the soft verdure of the spirit of this age as now inside
           of us and swollen by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
Pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river

And places one’s pinky oh so cautiously in.

“Me, a Brainworker” and “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” by Katy Lederer, reprinted from “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” © 2008 by Katy Lederer. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd. www.boaeditions.org