06-18-2018, 09:06 PM
https://www.myajc.com/business/kempner-d...XB6jXo45L/
Posted: 6:00 a.m. Friday, June 15, 2018
"Where did half our nation’s public companies go?
If you’ve got a hankering to invest your life savings, it might look as if you have plenty of options, some good and some unnerving.
There are stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, and even some cryptocurrency markets that concern regulators.
But the number of publicly traded companies has dropped by half since the mid 1990s.
We’re talking about some of the companies that put the capital “C” in Capitalism, from Walmart, Amazon and Bank of America to smaller players such as two in Georgia that became publicly traded earlier this year: GreenSky, which connects consumers with short-term financing for purchases, and Cardlytics, which runs bank rewards programs and crunches data for marketing.
The decline concerns Jay Clayton, the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“If you want to invest in the future growth of America, your opportunities to do so in the public market are not what they were 20 years ago,” he told me.
The businesses didn’t vanish: fewer new public ones were created as existing ones were merged, shuttered or delisted (whether because of troubles or because they were purposefully taken private). But remaining public companies are generally larger.
Clayton and the other SEC commissioners recently visited Atlanta to show they really want insights from Main Street investors, including some near Peachtree Street. Such a meeting - including all five commissioners - is rare outside D.C...."
There are two simple answers. One, the economy is gobbling up the middle market. You have giants and boutiques. Secondly, is SOX as mentioned in the article. Sarbannes-Oxley significantly increased the cost for public companies.
Posted: 6:00 a.m. Friday, June 15, 2018
"Where did half our nation’s public companies go?
If you’ve got a hankering to invest your life savings, it might look as if you have plenty of options, some good and some unnerving.
There are stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, and even some cryptocurrency markets that concern regulators.
But the number of publicly traded companies has dropped by half since the mid 1990s.
We’re talking about some of the companies that put the capital “C” in Capitalism, from Walmart, Amazon and Bank of America to smaller players such as two in Georgia that became publicly traded earlier this year: GreenSky, which connects consumers with short-term financing for purchases, and Cardlytics, which runs bank rewards programs and crunches data for marketing.
The decline concerns Jay Clayton, the chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“If you want to invest in the future growth of America, your opportunities to do so in the public market are not what they were 20 years ago,” he told me.
The businesses didn’t vanish: fewer new public ones were created as existing ones were merged, shuttered or delisted (whether because of troubles or because they were purposefully taken private). But remaining public companies are generally larger.
Clayton and the other SEC commissioners recently visited Atlanta to show they really want insights from Main Street investors, including some near Peachtree Street. Such a meeting - including all five commissioners - is rare outside D.C...."
There are two simple answers. One, the economy is gobbling up the middle market. You have giants and boutiques. Secondly, is SOX as mentioned in the article. Sarbannes-Oxley significantly increased the cost for public companies.