How To Kill The Public Stock Market In 8 Steps

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.

—
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.

—
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.

—
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