Comment by riffraff
6 hours ago
But Enron's bankruptcy affected people who could invest on the public market while FTX affected more directly "qualified investors" didn't it?
It seems the private/public split along the lines of "public companies should be more scrutinized" worked as intended.
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.