Companies have been dissuaded from going public in recent years because woke policies and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs caused “mayhem” on Wall Street, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said on the latest episode of “Pod Force One.”
“One of my pillars is to try to make IPOs great again,” the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission told “Pod Force One” host Miranda Devine.
“Part of that is to get back to basics – all of this mayhem in the corporate governance area, I submit, is one of the reasons why companies don’t want to go public,” Atkins argued. “They just don’t want to put up with the distraction of all of this because most of this does not have to do with the real fundamental issues of a company.”
Full Episode
President Trump tasked the SEC in December with looking into two “politically-motivated proxy advisors” – Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass, Lewis & Co. – which have received blame for pushing so-called “woke” policies, like environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets, on Wall Street firms.
Addressing the significant influence the two foreign-owned firms have in advising large investors on how to cast votes as shareholders on company matters may curb woke policies and encourage more start-ups to file initial public offerings (IPOs), Atkins said.
“It’s one thing for shareholders to hold directors accountable, but for a lot of these very non-substantive type of issues that don’t go to the economic reality of the company, I would submit that it’s a distraction,” the SEC chairman said. “And that through the power of these, or other sorts of shareholder groups, that it’s going towards their own issues that they have an ax to grind.”
Atkins pledged that the SEC “will be trying to reorient things back to basic principles.”
He estimated that the cost of social issues being imposed on companies runs into “the billions of dollars.”
As for why more companies should go public, the SEC chairman explained that it has benefits for both entrepreneurs and the country.
“One big one is that if you have a lot of employees, you can issue them stock as part of their compensation,” Atkins explained. “There are many companies that do that, big public companies for their employee stock option plans and things like that.”
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“Then, for the overall US economy to have a strong public market that attracts and builds on itself, because success obviously attracts more success in general, and so that means foreigners come here to invest in these markets,” he continued.
“So all this stuff builds on itself. It helps then with valuations for private companies. You have better comparables and all that, so it all builds on itself to have a good robust public market.”
