[tylervigen]

The author (Matt Levine) is always a bit tongue in cheek about securities fraud and the “socially useful” role shareholders play in pricing securities. He writes about these kind of incidents in a weekly basis, so his typical audience knows to read it that way.

[theGnuMe]

He likes to point out that basically everything and anything a company may do is securities fraud. It’s almost parody at this point, which I think is his point. So it’s basically impossible to exist without committing said fraud by definition. That seems to be a problem — likely a structural one as well. At some point everyone is going to use that as a defense (or maybe they have already) and the sec/courts/congress are going to have some work to do.

[medvezhenok]

It's probably intentional - securities fraud is a catch-all in the same way that tax evasion is an easy catch-all for all sorts of varied criminal activity which is much harder to prosecute.