Is Obama’s attack on venture capital a necessary consumer protection or another opportunistic power grab?
Please read the article before answering:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12392364…
Exerpt from the article quoting Tim Geithner, speaking on behalf of the administration, trying to justify the new draconian regulations:
“In justifying new SEC registration requirements, Mr. Geithner said that Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme demonstrated that investors need more protection. He didn’t mention that Madoff’s firm was registered with the SEC as an investment adviser and had also been regulated by the SEC for decades as a broker-dealer. Also, Madoff was not running a venture firm.”
Does Geithner know what he’s doing?
If not, we should all be afraid that he (and Obama) is in over his head.
If so, we should all be afraid that they are not interested in a thriving private sector.
Another excerpt:
Says Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers, “First, Sarbanes-Oxley mandated byzantine corporate bureaucracy to ‘protect’ investors. Then, the SEC damaged the Silicon Valley economy by forcing companies to count stock options twice, both as dilution and as expense. As a result, Silicon Valley, for decades the bright spot of the American economy, produced only one [initial public offering] in all of 2008. Now, Geithner wants to regulate venture capital firms to protect us some more. It’s like watching children deface an economic work of art.”