Paul Atkins

rather than the alternative, is chase it offshore.

And we saw what happened with FTX there, which was Sam Backman Freed's operation, which was in the Bahamas.

And he did a lot of hanky-panky there and hand in the till and whatnot.

But he had one, and this is the example I'd like to show.

There was one legitimate firm that he had bought that was still operating in the United States.

And it was a swaps trading platform for cryptocurrencies there.

And that was under CFTC regulation, and it had – it bided by segregated accounts for customers.

So when FTX imploded, LedgerX, it was called, didn't skip a beat.

It operated.

No customer lost any assets.

And then here recently, it was just sold out of the bankruptcy estate.

And it lives on to do good by its customers.

So that's an example of how responsible regulation and embracing financial innovation can lead to benefits for everybody.

Well, so we're talking about companies becoming public.

And so today we have about half the number of public companies as we had 30 years ago.

And so that comes about, you know, you have mergers and acquisitions and you have bankruptcies and whatever.

But so that takes, you know, the companies out of that space.

population.

And unless you have new ones coming in to replace the defunct ones, then you're going to have necessarily a diminishing number of corporations.

Over – what I'm suggesting here is that we address the reasons why people don't want to go public.