Matt Levine, Columnist

Leaving Russia for Morals or Money

Also CDS, Gazprom bonds, shorts, Bitcoin, anti-ESG, venture fees and meme activism.

March 7, 2022 at 6:32 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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If you are an international company or investor, why might you stop investing or doing business in Russia? There are two basic reasons:

You can obviously have both of these reasons, even though they are sort of opposites. The first reason is essentially altruistic (“we'll sacrifice money to do the right thing”1), the second is essentially profit-seeking (“we will get out of Russia to save money”). But if you get out of Russia for moral reasons and that also turns out to be good for you economically, well, you won’t complain.