What is Securities Fraud, Matt?

This post first appeared 6 August 2024.

Matt Levine is a columnist at Bloomberg where he has a column called Money Stuff.

One of the running themes in his pieces is that everything — according to him — is securities fraud . One would expect him to cover a fair amount of fraud as a financial columnist with legal training, but the list of things he’s claimed to be securities fraud over the years is… extensive.

However, I couldn’t find a definitive list of Things Matt Levine Thinks are Securities Fraud, so I wrote a quick script to scrape the archive on Bloomberg and, well…

The list of Things Matt Levine Thinks are Securities Fraud

Definitely

Things Matt Levine has declared “are” securities fraud:

Possibly

Including things “as” securities fraud, and things associated with securities fraud and things that are the target of securities fraud

Not

Things Matt Levine has emphatically claimed are not securities fraud:

Everything

I think Matt Levine might think Everything is securities fraud.

Types of Securities Fraud

Other

One of my own

Disclaimer I am not a journalist and this list is just a bit of fun. I have not read each of the above articles and am mostly going off Levine’s titles and subtitles. I’ve omitted a lot of other “fraud” articles and this list is by no way complete. I am not associated with Matt Levine or Bloomberg and the opinions expressed above are neither mine, nor likely Matt Levine’s.

  1. Possibly having your company name appear in a list containing the phrase “securities fraud” will trigger some web-scraping sentiment analysis model somewhere to shorten its position on the stock thus moving the price in a more automated version of this. ↩︎