Corporate Governance

On The Scarcity of IPOs

By Jessica N. Dell

As Steven Davidoff opine?s in the NYTimes Facebook's recent highly publicized sale of private shares to Goldman Sachs's clients is a "Rorschach test.?   His article considers allegations that SOX  is what stopped Facebook and others from going public sooner. Check out his  review of historical factors in the last decade - including regulations, crises, court rulings and changes in market structure to which he attributes the current dearth of IPOs.  According to Dealogic, he reports,  in 1996, the number of I.P.O.?s raising less than $25 million was 309, which declined to nine by 2001, a year before Sarbanes-Oxley, and was only 13 in 2010.

Full post as published by PomTalk on January 14, 2011 (boomark / email).