If I clipped every good Byrne Hobart or Matt Levine line I’d never get around to writing my own stuff but this from Byrne is too good to not share:

An extraordinary fact about finance is that there are some firms which are financial service providers specifically for scams which sometimes, almost as an industrial accident, bafflingly end up in a contractual relationship with a legitimate, successful company.

These underwriters are not necessarily that; some overlevered highly “structured” IPOs of midmarket software businesses should have a non-zero price, and a capitalist should not say they are a scam just because he is not a buyer at that price.

But occasionally you run into grey market infrastructure where it’s impossible everyone in management does not know the game they are playing.

One fun part of reading indictments and/or after-the-fact book-length reporting is reading the internal emails which are sometimes between bewildered execs who understand themselves to be working for a fraud factory and other execs who are repeating the thing meant to take rubes.

And sometimes one wonders “Is that second exec a true believer, and thus substantially less intelligent than the first exec? Or are they predicting for the current email to be excerpted in an indictment, and thus substantially more intelligent than the person writing mens rea?”

Mens rea = a legal concept of having a culpable mind, where you know you are engaged in invidious behavior (as opposed to simply being in business making bad decisions). Demonstrating it is often the hard part of white collar crime prosecutions.

The easiest way to demonstrate it? When someone violate’s Stringer Bell’s dictum on the wisdom of taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.