Wayne Jett has been doing a fantastic job following the issues surrounding market manipulation and specifically, some very interesting information regarding Goldman Sachs and software codes.  It’s not the free market if some folks aren’t following the rules of the road.  From Wayne:

Goldman Sachs is reputedly the biggest player in trading crude oil futures and derivatives. Major media showed no interest in reporting the role Goldman played, if any, in driving the price of crude oil from $45 to $147 per barrel, although the price aberration cost middle class Americans millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars.

    On July 5, the world learned from Reuters’ Mathew Goldstein that Goldman Sachs uses secret software on super-fast computers to conduct high-frequency trades, and that this software is capable of manipulating stock prices worldwide (if used by unscrupulous people, of course). An average investor immediately asks: what information would give Goldman an advantage over all other traders if Goldman reacts to it very rapidly? 

More on the subject from Wayne here and here.

And just in case any of you have missed this article that has been making the rounds, check out the Rolling Stone piece on Goldman.

UPDATE ON THE CODE 8/4 from Bloomberg: 

Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) – Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. computer programmer charged last month with stealing sophisticated trading software, is in talks with prosecutors to resolve the case, according to court papers.

Prosecutors and Aleynikov, 39, have agreed to delay the deadline for filing an indictment against him, to allow plea negotiations to go forward, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti said in an affirmation filed with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan yesterday.

and 

The proprietary code, worth millions of dollars, lets the firm do “sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,” prosecutors said in court documents. Facciponti said a person misusing the code might be able to “manipulate markets.”