Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Everything Is Also Bank Fraud

Everything is bank fraud

You know my theory: Every bad thing that a public company does is also securities fraud. If there is a data breach or sexual harassment or animal mistreatment or pollution at a company, and the public finds out about it and the stock goes down, then someone will sue the company, arguing that it defrauded shareholders by leading them to believe that there wouldn’t be a data breach or sexual harassment or whatever. And this theory is weird, and people sometimes say “wait shouldn’t securities fraud be for, like, accounting misstatements, not sexual harassment?” But it is ...