Paul Atkins

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.

So the idea is to make IPOs great again, initial public offerings great again, and to make it cool to be public again.

And the reason why people do not want to take their companies public is, one, the high cost of –

by the regulations that the SEC has imposed over the years.

Two is the litigation issues around

you know, a lot of frivolous lawsuits, let's say, that are filed against public companies because lawyers know that they can extract some, you know, settlement and then get contingency fees out of that.

And then finally is the weaponization of corporate governance.

So, shareholding proposals, many of your

listeners probably, you know, have owners of securities in one way or another.