Deep Dive Report on Privatizations and Ipos: BI Replay

The decades-long rise of corporate privatization and corresponding drop in the number of US publicly traded companies have reduced transparency for investors’ holdings. That is especially problematic for the $43.4 trillion of retirement assets, which increasingly are invested in closely held firms. President Trump recently ordered federal agencies to ease retirement plans’ access to private firms, and some federal lawmakers and regulators have considered demanding that such firms make disclosures along the same lines as publicly traded entities -- a shift that would have major implications for sprawling companies like Alphabet as well as for private equity funds like Blackstone. Join Bloomberg Intelligence's Small cap and sectors strategist, Mike Casper; BI’s chief private markets analyst Reza Hasan and M&A and IPO analyst, Andrew Silverman, in discussing the ramifications of two decades of decline in the number of public companies and the meteoric rise of private capital in the United States.