Matt Levine, Columnist

Don’t Do Deals on LinkedIn

Also LNG contracts, ESG ratings and a Russian derivatives trade.

August 8, 2023 at 5:59 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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The rule, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is that if you work at an investment bank or a brokerage firm or an investment adviser, you are allowed to communicate with your colleagues and clients about business on “official channels,” and you are not allowed to communicate with them about business on “unofficial channels.” There are some obvious cases:

The point of this, I suppose, is to make sure that all discussions of work are archived and searchable by your firm’s compliance department and the regulators. It doesn’t really accomplish those goals. For instance, I think that these cases are also pretty obvious, though this is not legal advice and I’m not 100% sure: