Academic journals don't usually generate the kind of buzz that has readers counting down the days to the publication date. But there's an intriguing exception on the horizon. On September 1, the American Institute for Economic Research's Econ Journal Watch will publish a symposium of economic "notes from the underground": essays written by guilt-ridden economists confessing instances of "moral or intellectual compromise" in their work. Qualifying sins may include:

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It is often a difficult task to make finance seem sexy and interesting, but there's a financial story now unraveling that effortlessly rivals the best James Bond or Jason Bourne novel.

Sergey Aleynikov, a former vice president at Goldman Sachs, was arrested at the airport in Newark, N.J., on July 3, about a month after he left the globe-spanning investment bank. At Goldman, Aleynikov, a competitive ballroom dancer, computer programmer, and Russian emigrant, had been in charge of the development of a "distributed real-time co-located high-frequency trading (HFT) platform," according to his LinkedIn profile.

The platform, according to informed speculation, is Goldman's "secret sauce." It's a highly sophisticated piece of code that absorbs market data and, within microseconds, makes trades based on that data. It's basically a black box of financial Kryptonite. According to numbers released by the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman dominates the realm of automated trading, and it is likely due in no small part to this platform. 

And according to federal charges, Aleynikov stole Goldman's black box, uploaded it to a German server, and then tried to hide his trail, wiping the record of his keystrokes. Goldman's network stored a backup, so the company was able to check it after alarm bells were triggered by Aleynikov's 32-megabyte upload. 

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