squawk box
v. phr.— «A former Merrill Lynch & Co. broker on trial for selling access to his firm’s “squawk box’ denied allowing clients to eavesdrop on internal orders at the firm, though he said he believed they were entitled to hear them. Kenneth Mahaffy Jr., 51, was the first to testify of seven men on trial in Brooklyn federal court on charges of conspiring to trade off orders made on company intercoms, or squawk boxes. Mahaffy, who worked at Merrill and Citigroup Inc.”s Garden City, New York offices, said he kept clients on conference calls all day, telling them of orders broadcast internally at both firms. “If I heard anything coming over the squawk that interested my clients, I would let them know,” Mahaffy told jurors today. “They are entitled to know what is going on in any particular equity at the trading desks at any time.”» —“Ex-Merrill Broker Denies Giving Clients ‘Squawk Box’ Access ” by Karen Freifeld Bloomberg Apr. 24, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...