We Need Enlightened Regulation

Technology is moving faster than government can keep up. For that, we need enlightened regulation, says David Weild, the former Vice President of NASDAQ and the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of IssuWorks, a company focused on creating technologies to better market securities.

Weild recently spoke at Exponential Finance, presented by Singularity University and CNBC. He pointed to the significant drop in the rate of IPOs every year as a sure sign that regulation is choking needed capital that drives innovation. “It’s interesting because when I was down in Congress I was asked, you know, by the republicans to say that there was too much regulation. And I was asked by the democrats to say that there was too little regulation. What I like to say is that I don’t think that there’s enough enlightened regulation,” Weild explained.

Since the early 1990s, prior to the dot com bubble, there would be an average of 500 IPOs every year, according to Weild. Once the bubble burst, government reacted with regulation that shrunk the annual number of IPOs to around 165.

Weild says that the regulation needs to be reformed: “We did a paper for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD.  We estimated that we should be doing 900 IPOs a year if we hadn’t changed market structure.  That was a regulatory shift.  So if you think about it all this great technology, but it’s not helping get capital into the hands of entrepreneurs.”

For more on Weild’s insights into how to make regulation more effective so that it allows greater innovation, watch this clip from Big Think’s interview: