‘The Claman Countdown’ panelists Kenny Polcari and Sam Stovall unpack market performance heading into the end of the year.
Despite subsequent rallies, the steep stock-market declines in early August and following volatility highlight the damage that Biden-Harris administration policies are inflicting on U.S. markets with dire consequences for the retirement savings of Americans who are not government employees with pensions. These destructive policies need to be reversed as soon as possible to protect the retirement savings of average Americans.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has continued Obama-era policies that are steadily reducing the number of public companies in the U.S. and drastically limiting the investing choices of average Americans, including in their 401(k) or IRA retirement accounts.
In 2021, when most of the Trump administration’s policies were still in place, the U.S. had 1,035 initial public offerings (IPO) of company stock, including many transactions involving the merger of public special purpose acquisition vehicles (SPACs) with private companies. Once the Biden-Harris SEC implemented its policies, U.S. initial public offerings plunged to 181 in 2022 and 154 last year.
The Biden-Harris SEC’s policies have actively discouraged companies from going public and have built on Obama-era policies to continue the long-term decline in the number of U.S. public companies since the 1990s.
The Biden-Harris administration continued bad regulatory policies promoted by the Obama administration. FILE: President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris arrive for a campaign event at Girard College in Philadelphia, Pa., on May 29, 2024. (Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed new leaders at the SEC who suddenly asserted that SPACs were investment companies that should be regulated like mutual funds despite decades of approving SPACs as public companies. The threat of such regulation, made without a law or a rulemaking proceeding allowing for public comment, chilled the SPAC boom that had reversed the decline in public companies.
The Obama-era Dodd-Frank law required public companies to make various disclosures on political hot topics such as the ratio of CEO pay to employee pay, the use of “conflict minerals” or participation in “extractive resources” industries, all of which make it unpleasant and expensive to be a public company.
Requiring disclosure on issues that typically have no relationship to a company earning a return for its shareholders opens up a new revenue source for the trial lawyers who file lawsuits against public companies alleging that they got such disclosure wrong. These lawsuits are often settled to avoid litigation costs, thus increasing the cost of being a…
Read More: How the Biden-Harris administration threatens your retirement savings