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It's said that the Sarbanes–Oxley Act's requirements for publicly traded companies made going public less desirable for many concerns, and this has resulted in

It's said that the Sarbanes–Oxley Act's requirements for publicly traded companies made going public less desirable for many concerns, and this has resulted in fewer public offerings over the last 14 years.

api 11y ago
I've thought for a while that SarbOx created the unicorn. In the end all it accomplished was to exclude the public from the best growth stocks. The problem with SarbOx is complexity, overhead, and ambiguity. It would have been possible to fix some of the excesses of revenueless dot.coms by adding a few simple criteria, but instead we added a ton of burden and made public markets undesirable. I've also wondered if SarbOx might not have been a factor in real estate hyperinflation by driving capital away from stock markets. It's gotta go somewhere.
- fludlight 11y ago
  SOX also created the going-private branch of banking/PE and served as a full employment act for accountants.
  - api 11y ago
    So in other words it was a "work making" handout to the financial industry. Bravo.
    - fludlight 11y ago
      It also made the industry a lot more honest. The shenanigans you hear about these days pale in comparison to what people got away with during the 90s.