Even for financial reporting, this is an egregiously awful bit of journalism. Once upon a time it was both an honor and a privilege to go public. A company wor

Even for financial reporting, this is an egregiously awful bit of journalism. Once upon a time it was both an honor and a privilege to go public. A company worked tirelessly for years just to get to that point and it leapt at the opportunity to do so rather than playing it cool or blowing off bankers when they first came calling. I'm sure we all remember the dot-com era internet companies who worked tirelessly for years to get a shot at the honor and privilege of an IPO. At least, I'm assuming that he's including these companies in his false-nostalgia, given that the two factors he blames for the loss of those halcyon days were the exchanges themselves going public (NASDAQ in 2002, NYSE in 2006) and the rise of HFT (which has really only grown to be a large part of the market since 2005). And isn't it terrible that a company wouldn't blindly jump at going public the instant bankers came calling? A comparison between Facebook today, pre-IPO, and almost any other company that is actually public on an exchange yields very little in the way of major differences Where "major differences" would have been 1. Billions in capital, which of course private companies never had before the early 2000s. 2. Thousands of investors, where of course there's no major difference between a few thousand privileged wealthy investors and tens or hundreds of thousands of regular investors and qualification for inclusion in institutional portfolios, mutual funds, and indices. 3. A bump in analyst coverage, because the large armies of analysts that roved Wall Street in the good ol' days would for some reason only cover public companies. Oh, and also because there are already a ton of analysts covering Facebook, even though automated trading and exchanges going public killed all the analysts, or something.