Tag: financial materiality

Commissioner Uyeda’s prescription for addressing decline in number of public companies

The public/private company dichotomy has been a perennial discussion topic. (See, e.g., this PubCo post, this PubCo post, this PubCo post, this PubCo post and this PubCo post.)   A statistic frequently tossed around is that there are about half as many public companies today as there were in 1996, and those that are around today are older and larger. And while the IPO market was in a bit of funk last year, the private markets have been viewed as consistently vibrant, with more capital raised in the private markets than in the public. But the question of why and how to address the decline in the number of public companies has been a point of contention: is excessive regulation of public companies a deterrent to going public or has deregulation of the private markets juiced their appeal, but sacrificed investor protection in the bargain?  At the end of January, we heard from SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw addressing the question of whether the securities laws governing private capital raises might be too lax. Now, SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda is speaking his mind on the topic, presenting remarks at the at the “Going Public in the 2020s” conference at Columbia Law School.