Comment by ed_balls
4 hours ago
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 could be considered the worst regulation of 21 century. It helped created behemoth corporations, where a single person can misallocate hundred of billon of dollars (Oh, hi Mark), they can buy out any competition.
Right now US economy is basically a centrally planned economy.
I've seen people use those three words to make a dig at zuckerberg before, but I never put 2 and 2 together and realized the quote until just now. I think the comma was essential, made my brain automatically read it correctly... Wiseau voice and all, lol.
More on-topic: I remain amazed by how the past quarter century of American legislation has included one overwhelming boon for corporations after another. Once corporations could give an infinitly higher amount of political contributions when compared to individual citizens, it became clear that the overall well-being and happiness of corporations was the only real political focus. Anything that doesnt directly or indirectly benefit a group of corporations is almost always designed to manipulate the electorate through invented/perceived/embiggened/non-cromulent "social issues".
The PayPal Mafia changed America.
have you heard of this dude named karl marx?
> It helped created behemoth corporations
What's the mechanism for this? Genuine question: I read an overview over Sarbanes-Oxley and it seems like a reasonable idea.
There is no mechanism. Finance and startup Bros want to dump their overvalued companies with deceitful accounting on public investors to make a quick profit and socialize the inevitable losses. SOX makes it harder for them to do that.
To whatever extent SOX compliance makes it more complex to go public, it has no meaningful effect on legitimate successful companies - if you think going public will allow you to raise the most money, you'll go public; if ZIRP meant you could indefinitely raise private money, you'd stay private. Finance and startup bros want to blame companies staying private on SOX, but it has everything to do with either (1) the companies being deeply questionable from an accounting perspective, or (2) the companies being able to raise whatever investments they wanted in private without taking any of the costs of an IPO (e.g. the IPO pop, which could (simplisticaly) be thought of as money being made by the banks underwriting the IPO rather than by the existing owners/investors).