The red flag is a perspicuous danger-ahead warning. It is a highly charged, often offensive public signal that something is wrong between business partners or between a firm and the government's regulators.

The red flag is in the interstitial spaces between in-group innuendo and slander (gossip) and criminal charges (indictment). The intermediate nature of accusations makes them important for understanding communicative processes and the collective imagination. They contain innuendo as well as the threat of civil or criminal action.

All fraud charges generated by the SEC have criminal counterparts. Whether criminal charges ultimately emerge after the accusations and rebukes is usually a function of intent to defraud; the question is whether the charges can be proved to the far higher criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

But at the beginning of this process the red flags of rebukes always involve succinct public declarations of what went wrong in a particular economic exchange. They may even give rise to “counter accusations” stating, for example, that the complaints are without factual basis, are exaggerated and stuffed with trumped-up sucker-bait. They always take place within a rich market context full of announcements and their announcers and thus, preserving these words and voices is tantamount to observing the contentious moments in the market.

Variously called “alarm bells,” “cautionary flags,” and “warning signs,” red flags are announcements that “redefine” or “restructure” an ambiguous socioeconomic issue and locate its place in the market.