Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California and my friend from Missouri, and I rise in support of this bill, H.R. 2812, the middle market IPO underwriting cost act. I thank Chairman McHenry and Ranking Member Waters for considering these bills on the floor today, and this bill in particular, which we have been working on for a very long time. This bill, H.R. 2812, grows out of the work that the Financial Services Committee has been doing for a long time around the JOBS Act, which did good work to reduce the cost and friction associated with a young company going public. At the time, the JOBS Act was estimated to save companies between $1 million and $2 million a year when and after they go public, but the actual cost of going public, except for the very largest companies, as the gentleman from California noted, has not changed at all in many, many years. Over those years, middle-market companies, which arguably have less negotiating power than some of the very large companies that have been able to force down fees, have experienced a perfectly consistent gross spread of 7 percent. Think about that. The price of going public has never varied from 7 percent. That means that a young company raising a typical $200 million in capital, with a 7 percent gross spread, hands over $14 million to the underwriters. That is a lot of money for a young company. From 2001 to 2022, 95 percent of U.S.…”