Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Nothing Is Securities Fraud?

Arbitration

Two popular themes around here are:

1. Everything is securities fraud, and
2. Private markets are the new public markets.

These themes are related. “Everything is securities fraud” means mainly that, if a bad thing happens at a public company, some enterprising shareholder class action lawyers will sue it for securities fraud. “You didn’t tell us that the bad thing would happen, so we bought stock, then it happened, and our stock went down, and we were defrauded,” etc. We talk about these lawsuits all the time because there is something funny in the accumulation of them. The other day I ...