Markets - Where did all the stocks go?
Public Companies In Decline
The number of public companies has fallen fast by Matt Phillips, David Crowther 4/28/24
"...After analyzing the effects of mergers, private-equity investment, and regulatory costs, the paper suggests that M&A is the main culprit. (Though they do theorize that higher costs associated with regulation could be a less important contributing factor.)
“Mergers seem to be the biggest driver of this trend,” Ali Sanati told Sherwood. Sanati is a finance professor at the American University in Washington, DC, and a coauthor of the 2023 paper.
The authors categorized mergers according to various financial metrics, noting that mergers motivated around financing and innovation “are the ones that effectively reduce the number of U.S. listings.”
@shekinahcancook that's an interesting article. Thanks for posting. The lack of consumer choice resulting from our current drift towards monopolism reminds me of how economies were under monarchies, before market economics: a monarch would give a license for a particular activity to one company or group of investors. And consumers had to accept that. We're losing 600 years of economic progress so the world's billionaires can pretend to be royalty.
@shekinahcancook r
Extremists don't seem to like market economies and religious extremists the world over have accumulated billions in petro dollars. One action is to quit using oil, cut the extremists off from their income. And don't allow new possibilities: We don't need lithium billionaires, for instance.
The ugly truth is that western culture will give up excessively complicated and needlessly resource wasteful tech only when it's pried out of their cold dead bank accounts.
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