So Bear Stearns shares are up after it was revealed that China Citic Group wants to buy a stake in the troubled US investment bank. Let's forget for a moment about the flawed business models that rely on dangerous amounts of debt that make the big investment banks look like subprime mortgage borrowers, loaded up with too much borrowed money and unable to offload their assets.

This potential deal has a whole lot of interesting implications.

"For Bear, a minority investment would be more symbolic than financial. They're also trying to get into China, so this could be the way in,'' Bruce Foerster, president of Miami-based advisory firm South Beach Capital Markets told Bloomberg .

Standard & Poor's investment bank and brokerage analyst Matthew Albrecht seemed to agree, telling Associated Press that it would give Bear Stearns the perfect opportunity to expand internationally.

Or would it?

The more interesting question for me is about the enormous potential this sort of deal offered for insider traders. Consider this: most big companies in China, including Citic, are all controlled by the Government. Their managers report to a range of bureaucrats and political cadres, each of them with their own gang of proteges and hangers-on. And because of the foreign policy implications, it would have to be bounced off a range of people.

So how would you keep sensitive information, like a bid for a big Wall Street bank, under wraps.

This is not to say that anyone connected with China made a killing on Bear Stearns stock. But it highlights the risk when you have a state run apparatus playing the market.