We saw
an interesting article recently concerning the place in our world for
IPO’s. The article argued that whereas IPO’s used to raise money for
small companies, now they don’t really serve that function very well. The
flip side is that growing companies that don’t want to be public are stuck once
they reach 500 shareholders and decent sized assets, in filing periodic reports
whether they want to encourage a market for their stock, or need capital, or
not. Google didn’t need the money and Facebook doesn’t either. And,
of course, our increasing web of regulations (a lá Sarbanes Oxley) all based in
an effort to regulate away dishonesty (good luck with that; how’d it work out
in Bernie Madoff’s case) makes doing business harder and harder for the honest
folk. We think that our markets are not well served in any way:
Expense, burden; capital formation; reporting, ease of use, transparency,
etc. They simply don’t work.
We’ve advocated
before for a securities opt-out. You don’t want SEC protection, opt out
of their protection, good luck, and caveat emptor. Maybe we need some
wholly unregulated markets for trading securities. The family Buzz has
wanted for a long time a TSA-free airline. Everyone get on the flight
with your Louisville sluggers and during flight we’ll see whether the good guys
or the bad guys are better batters [credit where credit is due: That was
the idea of a director of a public company we represent]. If the nanny
state was created for our own good, can’t we decide we don’t want the
protections offered? In any case, we’ll likely see incremental changes in
the SEC’s watchful eye but we doubt we’ll see any real reform. Maybe
we’ll just keep exporting public offerings to Britain, Canada, and Hong Kong.
-- Paul Marotta
No comments:
Post a Comment