Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Privates Are the New Securities Fraud

Everything is securities fraud

Two popular themes around here are:

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

We talked about this last month. I wrote then that those themes are related. “Everything is securities fraud” means that any time a bad thing happens at a US public company, enterprising plaintiffs’ lawyers will sue the company for securities fraud (or for violations of fiduciary duties), arguing that shareholders were somehow deceived about the bad thing. “Private markets are the new public markets” means that companies are staying private longer, mostly for structural reasons having to do ...