I wonder if requiring it twice a month would fix both issues, since it's too frequent to plan around (versus quarterly), while frequent enough to allow transparency (versus annually).
> All the businesses with the highest demand for their shares are clearly not short-sighted.
Where is the proof?
As long as CEOs and executives compensation is tied to stock performance, which is highly tied to news and short term results, basic economics and game theory suggests that short-sightedness is indeed encouraged.
This is especially problematic for businesses where plannings have to be done 4/5/6+ years in advance like auto industry, aircrafts or semi conductors.
It takes an awful lot of time and money to plan a new processor architecture and build an ecosystem around it, from chip manufacturing to packaging.
Go down that list and you can see almost all those businesses are ones that plowed and continue to plow billions of dollars into investments that will not pan out for many years.
I don’t think any of the top ones got to where they were with quarter to quarter goals.
“Cashing in” is on bets made many years ago is making my point. Amazon didn’t stop once it had the book market or even the online retail market (see AWS), Apple didn’t stop with ipod or iphone (see M processors/Airpods/Watch/etc), Meta didn’t stop with Facebook (see instagram/whatsapp/VR), Alphabet didn’t stop with Google (Waymo, Gmail, Drive), Eli Lilly with GLP-1 trials, etc.
They could stop, and switch to quarter to quarter decision making and juice their numbers even more. Maybe they will, and then eventually those businesses will drop in the rankings (IBM/GE/etc).
But the idea that quarterly reporting makes businesses short sighted is clearly false.
Leaders with short term motivations makes businesses short sighted (obviously). Sometimes, that’s justified because the business sector is winding down, sometimes it’s due to incompetence, and sometimes it’s due to greed.
You know I can easily give you plenty of counter examples of decisions made for short term gains and stock pumping, right?
At the end of the day most of these CEOs are valued by the stock price and they need to follow investors expectations which are very often short sighted.
Intel, Boeing and countless others are obvious examples.
All the companies you listed went the "let's cut personnel or bets even if we're making gazzilions to appease the stock market".
> You know I can easily give you plenty of counter examples of decisions made for short term gains and stock pumping, right?
nonethewiser made the claim that if quarterly financials are required, then businesses will make short term decisions.
Disproving this only requires me to provide 1 example, although I provided quite a few examples of businesses that provided quarterly financials and still made long term decisions.
I never claimed that quarterly financials prevent short term decisions, so your counterexamples are disproving a claim I did not make.
> All the companies you listed went the "let's cut personnel or bets even if we're making gazzilions to appease the stock market".
It is possible for businesses to change from making long term decisions to short term decisions (and back), and it is also possible that cutting personnel was not done solely to appease the stock market due to fluctuations in demand for labor.
Listing on a public exchange is not a requirement, but it is generally a boon to the public interest. The theory is that if we close the gap in regulatory burden between public companies and large private companies, then maybe we'll see more IPOs like back in the 90's, before Sarbanes-Oxley and other new laws.
Now, with an admin that's disposed to deregulation, the usual approach to closing that gap is to loosen requirements on public companies. You don't see a lot of people advocating for closing the other half of the gap, where we increase the reporting requirements on private companies. Stricter requirements there seem justified if you look with a bit of realism at how many consumer-facing funds are holding little pieces of unicorns. A lot of people have a stake in SpaceX or Stripe, one way or another. I'd like to see at least a few proposals that make it less comfortable to stay private for so long.
FWIW even if we weren't in this admin, I think it would be a harder sell to increase reporting requirements on private companies. The whole point of private capital and private companies is that LPs (edit: liquidity providers) are required to have some form of accreditation to prove that they aren't dumb money and that they have the capital to weather large drawdowns.
The problem of growing private capital markets and liquidity has been an issue for ~20 years now.
Yeah. It's not obvious how to do it. I just wish that policy people would do some thinking in this direction.
(Nit: I believe that in venture contexts, LP = "limited partners". A "liquidity provider" usually means the same thing as a market maker, at which point you're talking about the secondary / listed / public markets.)
(re Nit: depending on your terminology, liquidity provider can be many things and in modern markets one can argue that the concept of a "market maker" isn't a practical reality if how liquidity flows, but that's also why I wrote the edit to clarify which LP I was talking about)
> The theory is that if we close the gap in regulatory burden between public companies and large private companies, then maybe we'll see more IPOs like back in the 90's, before Sarbanes-Oxley and other new laws.
Yes, maybe. The optimal number of scandals is sadly not zero, and any given piece of legislation tends to overreact, fighting the last battle without seeing all the potential second-order consequences. Even the most carefully-crafted laws are worth giving another look, periodically.
Note that FTX, for example, was privately held. If it had been born in the nineties, the norm would be for it to go public, and have at least a modicum of disclosure; staying private would have been weird, a red flag. Instead, "our generation's Enron" had no public markets oversight whatsoever, SOX or otherwise.
So yeah, it's necessary to find a balance. You are choosing between a little regulation on a lot of companies, or a lot of regulation on a smaller and smaller chunk of the economy each year.
> fighting the last battle without seeing all the potential second-order consequences. Even the most carefully-crafted laws are worth giving another look, periodically.
Dare I say the special interests that ghost write the bulk of the text of any given legislation are specifically banking on those second and Nth order consequences.
Not directly related to FTX, but to the public vs. private discourse, if I'm not mistaken there are now a lot of pension funds and related financial institutions which have redirected a big part of their funds towards privately-owned unicorns/big companies through indirect means, and if those privately-owned unicorns/big companies were to do some shady things those pension funds would be much less in the know compared to if they'd invested their money in public companies.
One could make the valid point that those pension funds shouldn't have been (indirectly) invested in those privately-owned unicorns to begin with, but doing that would have most probably come with opportunity costs for those pension funds (as for some reason or another private big companies have been seen as bringing in more money for each dollar spent compared to big public companies, at least when it comes to the last 8-10 years).
As the OP implies, there needs to be some sort of balance between public and private companies, each of them need to be, in effect, more like the other in the eyes of the State/taxman, State-run regulators and the like.
Not quite, but only because the FTX case was weird. Many individuals from around the world were users. They didn't sign up to be investors, or even to be depositors in a banking sense, and so not all of them were qualified/accredited investors. However, SBF unilaterally and secretly treated them like investors, borrowing from them to finance various schemes. So no, FTX's fallout was not limited in that way.
The people and venture funds that officially owned FTX were a narrower group, and I assume they were all qualified investors. But the thing about our disclosure regime is that protecting the official owners of the company is only one goal, the one that serves as the pretext. Informally, various regs on public companies are designed to bring sunlight more generally, and to prevent a wider array of crimes and shenanigans than just defrauding the company's owners. Public companies also have rules and norms around governance which, had FTX been been subject to them, would have made a difference.
> It seems the private/public split along the lines of "public companies should be more scrutinized" worked as intended.
Only if the intention was also, "...and public companies should be an ever-shrinking share of the economy". There are a number of reasons why one might not have intended that. Ordinary investors miss out on early growth, and the good side-effect of general sunshine and governance norms only covers a sliver of the economy, missing many of the most dynamic firms that could use some scrutiny.
> being listed on public exchanges is not a requirement
it used to be raise money. now that money is done privately. the result exacerbates the gap between private and public markets and ultimately between rich and poor. Private market participation is usually for accredited investors where you need $1m net worth.
Public markets are one of the best ways to create wealth in the US, if the historical record is any hint about the future. Fewer public companies gives regular investors less choice. So if you're a private company and you have 1/2 as many reports to file each year, well now you have a slightly less onerous reporting regime and slightly tilts in favor of going public.
What in heavens gave you that idea?
A well developed public stock market is such a new (and American thing) and it still makes up a small amount of the capital raised by businesses.
Even within large public companies, there's significant use of bank/private debt.
It’s in the best interest for companies to list publicly though. We want as many people in the country invested in as many good companies. Equity in the country is mutual self interest. Similar to why we want a nation of home owners, not renters.
I think it might be _unethical_ to not spread the joy of playing Doom for the first time? Though, I’m not entirely sure there’s been enough research done about the effects of violent video games in rat gamer populations.
We've been putting rats in skinner boxes for a lot longer than we've been subjecting human gamers to them. I'd be more worried about the health effects of all that sugar water.
Giving them slightly acidic water off-rig and normal water while playing is another option - not the best either. I opted for sugar in the end, because they didn't spend much time on the setup; but this should be reconsidered if they on-rig for hours daily.
It's more like locking humans up in the matrix. Note lines like "preventing it from leaving the apparatus" in the build guide. Would an ordinary gamer be restricted from exiting such a contraption?
I was very happy to see this. I’m fairly against live animal testing, but giving rats the joy of playing Doom??? I think I _may_ have to be OK with this.
I do not think I appreciated the formula until I had been exposed to the exponential map in its generalized forms: The so-called 'matrix exponential' and the exponential map of Lie algebra. They place Euler's humble formula into a grander and rather beautiful setting.
Now, I like to think of exponentiation as a kind of integral over infinitesimal generators; and $i$ just happens to be a generator for rotation about a circle in the plane (aka $\mathrm{U}(1)$ aka $x \mapsto e^{it}x$).
Dismissing the FreeBSD community as contrarians feels uncharitable. I can think of at least a few other contributing factors for the increase in popularity of late:
1) Linux's popularity has enlarged the pool of users interested in Unix-like operating systems. Some proportion of users familiar with Unix genuinely like FreeBSD and the unique features it offers.
2) The rise of docker and the implosion of VMWare has driven an increase of interest in FreeBSD Jails and the Bhyve hypervisor.
3) Running a homelab is a popular hobby. ZFS is popular for RAID, and pf is popular for networking.
This distinction is only made by a small number of mostly constructivists.
It is not common usage, and most working mathematicians will have no idea what you're talking about.
Reporting is burdensome, sure, but being listed on public exchanges is not a requirement.
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