How to kill the public stock market.
Step 1: The number of public companies naturally shrinks each year due to mergers, takeovers, and bankruptcies.
Step 2: Use regulatory “reforms” to radically reduce the rate of new IPOs, shrinking the number of public companies from 8,800 to 3,600 since 1997.
@pmarca I should have waited for the punchline.. well played.
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Tyler Shields (@txs) March 31, 2014
Step 3: Steadily increase the number of regulators, lawyers, activists, pressure groups, and “governance experts” against the shrinking number of public companies.
Step 4: The “Pounds per square inch” of pressure on each public company increases, further disincenting new IPOs and incenting private takeovers.
@pmarca in other words, brutally punish and dis-incent "public-ness" and then complain about all these private companies.
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Farooq Butt (@fmbutt) March 31, 2014
Step 5: Private growth companies go public much later or not at all, shifting growth and capital gains from the public to the private market.
Step 6: Without growth, it gets harder and harder to realize the gains in the public market required by investors, particularly for retirement plans.
@Nemo_incognito Yep, I think that's it.
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Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 2014
Step 7: Layer on top a healthy dose of market manipulation, mutual fund front-running, and HFT profit extraction.
Step 8: Repeat as necessary until the blood is completely squeezed from stone, then wonder what happened to the good old days.
Step 9? Subsidize IPO's? MT @pmarca: Repeat until blood completely squeezed from stone, then wonder what happened to the good old days.
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Alfredo Delgado (@Alfredo_Delgado) March 31, 2014
Source Tweets: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8