John Stepek

Yeah.

of the public markets being much more important again being the place where people actually come to raise large amounts of money and we're beginning to see increasing supply both of absolute number of shares and absolute number of companies that we can all buy not just at this very top end but across the board yeah which is great i think for transparency for liquidity for wealth equality for sharing in the growth i mean these all seem like good things to me it may mean possibly that

annual performance across the board isn't quite so good because the supply dynamic changes back in the other direction.

But that aside, this seems to me like a really good thing.

Capital markets being used in the way that they were designed to be used.

It is a good thing.

I mean, let's say it's the purpose of capital markets.

And it is also interesting because it's not just about the rush or the mega caps.

I think you can argue the shift from public to private markets was for a number of things, but one was that private markets were much less hassle than public markets, especially after the dot-com bubble and all the extra compliance that you had to do.

And I think that obviously the big thing that's changed as well over the last kind of five years certainly is the interest rates have shot up.

So private capital is much harder to come by.

It's much more expensive.

So the disparity is starting to close.

Now obviously the fact that equity prices have shot up also means the cost of equity capital is lower.

So it's suddenly getting more attractive to do that than to borrow the money.

But I, you know, even if that comes down again, kind of equity markets come down again, you've still got the issue that private markets are a kind of rather constipated in the moment.

interest rates aren't going anywhere soon.

And also there's a general move to make private markets more transparent and sort of like, I guess, sort of address this kind of disparity between the compliance burden on private companies versus public companies.

And the more you do that, I mean, even if it means dumping more on them rather than taking stuff off the public.

You might as well be public.