Rewriting the Rules: The SEC & CFTC on Crypto, IPOs & the Future of American Markets
Episode publishedPodcast: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sa...All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Alright, everybody. Welcome to the all in interview program. Today, we are delighted to have two of the most important individuals shaping capital markets over the next couple of years. SEC chair Paul Atkins is with us as well as CFTC chair Michael Seelig. Welcome to the All In interview show, gentlemen.
Glad to be here. Very much. Great to be here.
Yep. Also with me, my bestie, Shammath Palihapitiya, who is known to participate in capital markets. I think there's a great structure here for us to talk. Many opportunities and then guardrails and things that we should be concerned about in such a dynamic time. Chairman Atkins, this is your third tour of duty since the nineties. Things have changed dramatically. So maybe just to start us off here, and I know Chamath's got a lot of great questions ready to go. I'm just curious, in your time, let's say the last forty years or so, what has what have you noted here about capital markets and how
Well, thanks. It's great to be here and see both of you all today. Well, so I started out as a young lawyer in New York City doing corporation finance work, you know, new offerings and that sort of thing in the mid eighties. And and it's and there, you know, to to be a start up company and to to build your products and do r and d and all that, you had to go public in order to so Apple and Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices, all of those companies started off as as, you know, IPOs. And so Andreessen Horowitz has a really, I think, a really good bar chart where they compare the companies of the e
When you look at that back then, there was a real requirement for everybody to do an enormous amount of work because to your point, these companies were quite young. You'd be a four or five year old company and you'd go public because the going public was not about monetizing anything. It was actually a fundraising moment. It was like a series c or or a series d. I guess the answer is the reason it changed was probably because, to your point, there's all these returns. And so investors said, well, let's go capture these in the private markets for us and our LPs. But what it also does is then c
Yeah. Well, it's a free market, obviously, so, you know, investors, we should allow the market to develop as it will. But, you're exactly right. So now it's more of a liquidity event, for insiders. And and so what we are seeing now is, in the private markets, you know, there's a lot of capital that's, where people are willing to deploy it to companies at early stages and then to to stay on. But at the same time, there is there are inhibitions for for private companies to go public, and one of them is the the cost of our rules to comply with our rules and the disclosure ones, especially where y
Are you allowed to convene a group of people and start to line item these rules out or change them, or does it have to go through some much more robust process where there's a lot of competing reasons why some people, some lobbies maybe, may want these rules?
Oh, sure. I mean, are vested interests in everything, but that is part of my program, for this year and going into next is to go through our rule book. We need a spring cleaning. We need to clean out the attic, the basement, and the garage, and to really look at things unlike the agency has ever done before with a real focus on materiality. So that's one. The second, to make IPOs great again, is to focus on litigation. And so that is another thing that is a key inhibition, I think, for people to go from the private markets to public. The threats of class action lawsuits and vexatious
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