Matt Levine is back from paternity leave and has amusing things to say about sometimes-appalling business things, as usual. [...] By the way, if you're not a Bloomberg subscriber (I'm not anymore)...
Matt Levine is back from paternity leave and has amusing things to say about sometimes-appalling business things, as usual.
In the larger sense, though, this is kind of a weird thing for shareholders to sue over. Like, your job as a shareholder is to pick the right businesses to invest in. Your expectation should be that if you invest in a business that makes good products you will make money, and if not you will lose money. If your expectation is that if you invest in a good business you will make money, and if you invest in a bad business you can go to court and complain and the court will give you your money back, then maybe your job is a little too easy.
I gather, though, that Cyberpunk 2077 is about a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia. (I mean, from the name?) And I guess these lawsuits are kind of cyberpunk? Like my fictional techno-dystopian future will be a world controlled by corporations in which there are no laws except securities laws, and you can run around, naked from the waist down, murdering people with lasers, with no consequences except shareholder lawsuits.
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Of course the lawyers get a cut of those settlements. “Sexual harassment is securities fraud” is an idea that will buy a big yacht for the lawyer who came up with it. It’s so much better—for the lawyer—than suing directly for sexual harassment. If you sue for sexual harassment you have to recruit individual plaintiffs who were harassed, and you have to prove their cases, and they’re all probably different so it’s harder to make it a lucrative class action, and they are actual individual humans who have been harmed and you have to be sensitive to their trauma. If you sue for sexual-harassment-as-securities-fraud, the plaintiffs are easy to find (big shareholders), you don’t really have to prove harassment (just refer to news accounts), your clients are only in it for the money, everything is clean and simple and easy. Also the dollar amounts are larger: In some subjective moral sense, sure, employees are more harmed by a toxic work environment than shareholders are, but if the toxic work environment is at a large public company, and the stock drops, then it’s really easy to argue that the shareholders lost a huge amount of money and should get it back.
By the way, if you're not a Bloomberg subscriber (I'm not anymore) you can subscribe by email. I have the email automatically forwarded to Newsblur, so it's just like any other RSS feed.
Matt Levine is back from paternity leave and has amusing things to say about sometimes-appalling business things, as usual.
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By the way, if you're not a Bloomberg subscriber (I'm not anymore) you can subscribe by email. I have the email automatically forwarded to Newsblur, so it's just like any other RSS feed.