No U.S. tech company went public in Q1 2016
qz.com
qz.com
The only disadvantage to private investment is liquidity. Otherwise, it's way better to be non-public (less hostile takeovers, less activist investors, less regulations, less mandatory transparency, less managing for 1Q instead of 5Y).
This feels like more evidence for a tipping point between capital and labor.
FTFY: s/shareholders/management with incentive options/g
I'm planning on liquidating most of my investments after I retire and have no wage income, so I save a lot of money when a corporation does buybacks instead of disbursing dividends this year when I'm employed and in a higher tax bracket.
a) Dividends. Each shareholder receives $0.10/share in taxable dividends payable in the same calendar year. Share price drops to $0.90/share.
b) Buyback. The company buys 10 shares, leaving share price at $1 but now only 90 shares outstanding.
With option (a) each shareholder must pay taxes on $0.10 in the same tax year. With option (b), shareholders can choose not to pay taxes immediately by not selling. Also taxes are paid on ($1 - cost basis) which might be a lot less than $0.10/share.
This is only evidence of the fact that people will structure their transactions to avoid taxes. Without taxes favoring buybacks they would be identical to dividends.
"This is a sign of US strength, not weakness. In many countries going public may be the only way to raise permanent capital, and banks the only way to finance investments, but the US has a sprawling venture capital industry, deal-hungry private equity firms, relatively healthy banks, a private placement market that is the envy of many other countries, and the most vibrant corporate bond market on the planet."
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/534b5560-f7d1-11e5-96db-fc683...
https://www.google.com/search?q=IPO+market+decrepit+as+going...
By what definition can it be considered a weakness?
That is, already-wealthy VCs are still seizing lucrative opportunities on private markets (as pointed out). It's just the public that isn't able to participate because companies aren't going public.
Publicly traded companies are one of the most important pro-egalitarian components of Capitalism.
Capitalism eventually buys the market. There has never been a different outcome.
Beyond that, the reason private equity firms are so "deal-hungry" is low interest rates put a damper on returns from all sources.
The problem with SarbOx is complexity, overhead, and ambiguity. It would have been possible to fix some of the excesses of revenueless dot.coms by adding a few simple criteria, but instead we added a ton of burden and made public markets undesirable.
I've also wondered if SarbOx might not have been a factor in real estate hyperinflation by driving capital away from stock markets. It's gotta go somewhere.
Twitter: -32%
LinkedIn: -44%
Pure Storage: -28%
Square: -4%
This is a bubble, popping.
[1] http://www.renaissancecapital.com/news/tech-sector-sell-off-...
Speculative investments are on a steep decline as well, with many folks buying into plain-jane savings accounts with sub-1% rates of return rather than more exotic financial tools.
Will we see reforms to woo them back, or is the Federal government generally unconcerned (other than paying lip-service to the banks)?
1. Regulate market capitalization of corporations
2. Tax corporate revenues, not profits
Ultimately, those companies would all merge or be bought out until they were one company to just pay taxes once.
Say what? As I understand it, a basic theme of income taxation for me as an individual in the USA, and indeed most (perhaps all?) western countries is that if I buy something for B and sell it for S, I get taxed for S-B income. And as I understand it, that basic theme really is the way that it works for a lot of businesspeople, though they may need to be quite careful to jump through certain hoops (particular kinds of recordkeeping e.g.) to ensure that it works that way reliably. And it is roughly the way it works for individuals not ordinarily considered businesspeople when they buy and sell things like residences and securities, although it's sometimes wrapped up in extra weirdness like special real estate tax categories and short term vs. long term security capital gains.
What country or countries are you referring to?
Or are you just referring to the fact that employees employment expenses are not as eligible for deduction as many business expenses, securities transactions, and real estate transactions? (And, um, bringing in "corporations" for some rhetorical reason that I can't fathom?) That would make it roughly true to say "taxes business profits but taxes labor revenues." But to characterize that as "gov't taxes corporations' profits and individuals' revenues" seems more nearly false.
Also, that is a radically different tax treatment of labor revenues and business revenues, but you don't explain what you find particularly curious about that. For good or for ill, radically different economic policy treatment of labor revenues and business revenues is pretty widespread, not limited to tax policy. E.g., consider how business monopolistic collusion to restrict supply is broadly forbidden even when the collusion is wholly voluntary, while labor unions are not just allowed to collude voluntarily to restrict the supply of labor but supported in actively preventing rivals from providing a supply of labor.
You've put it much better than I did. What I find curious (and insulting) is that the government effectively values my time and energy at $0.
The last time IPOs looked like this was in the starting (and also end) of 2008, just before (and after) the market crashed.
So, we've got a 7 year period of nearly steady growth in IPOs, and then a cliff over the past year.
A "chilly market" often leads to a crash, due to the vicious circle it creates.