alt Hacker News> The increase in regulations, post GFC, made it impractical/impossible for small companies to go public.
Care to be more specific? "Regulations bad" is a pretty common platitude around here but you've stated your main thesis, here, without a hint of support to back it.
My observation is that the glut of available private credit has meant for at least 15 years you could just raise funds from those markets, and that's the ultimate reason IPOs have become less common.
This hasn't made it "impossible" for companies to go public. It just eliminated the need. If you can raise billions of dollars in a G round why go to the public markets at all?
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Sure. SOX reg sec 302 and 404. Section 302 is a 100% dealbreaker for most companies, so I stand by my 'impossible' threshold. My comment was simply shorthand for all the upfront and downstream costs of going public, combined with fewer exit alternatives. Auditor/directors increased/personal liability, litigious shareholders, time and attention of management, etc. And, to your point, the lower cost of capital from growth investors. But that wasn't always the case. Certainly not true during the dot-com bubble (pre-SOX). I'll leave it to the academics to try to and isolate causality.
There's no strong consensus, but there's weak consensus that post-GFC regulation is a factor behind but is not causal in any way, for the decrease in IPOs. Here's a paper [1] (well it's the paper author discussing his paywalled paper lol) exploring SOX regulations and their effects on IPOs. There's other papers and I think a good survey will help you on this topic. I don't think there's consensus on regulations being the causal factor, but it is one of many.
I thought GP was modest in calling it out as simply a contributing factor. Regulation is complicated and reaching for it should be something done with care.
(Also FWIW, I think you're being a bit cheap by appealing to culture war talking points.)
[1]: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2009/09/21/the-effect-of-sox...
They're poking at SOX and Dodd-Frank I think, but it's a bit of a specious argument, in my opinion the rise of massive private equity (plus the absurd market orientation around short term results) is more of the story, as you say.