, Columnist
Don’t Send Your Boss’s Lies to Customers
Also badwill, stablecoins, evidence preservation, GSEs and crosswords.
If you work at a boiler room, and your boss writes an email full of lies and tells you to send it to customers to get them to buy securities, and you know that it is full of lies but he is your boss so what are you gonna do, and you send the email on to customers, have you committed securities fraud? I feel like when I put it like that the answer is obviously yes, and in fact yesterday in a 6-2 decision the Supreme Court ruled that the answer is yes.
But there was a decent legalistic argument that the answer was no. The legalistic argument — which did convince two Supreme Court justices — goes like this: