Yesterday, May 13th, the Subcommittee on Capital Markets and GSEs held the second part of its hearings, “Legislative Proposals to Enhance Capital Formation and Reduce Regulatory Burdens,” at 2pm. Among the topics to be covered were bills that would establish venture exchanges to promote secondary market liquidity for the securities of smaller companies (the proposed bill, introduced by Congressman Garrett, is titled The Main Street Growth Act); change the research safe harbors to address ETF and mutual fund related research; modify the shelf registration process to make it more accessible to more issuers; and require a retrospective review of SEC rules. Additional information about today’s hearing, including the texts of the proposed bills, is available here: http://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=399019.
The first part of these hearings, which were held on April 29th, considered 12 bills, many of which had been introduced in the last session of Congress and all of which are intended to promote capital formation. Those include:
HR 432, the “Small Business Investment Company Advisers Relief Act of 2015”
HR 686, the “Small Business Mergers, Acquisitions, Sales, and Brokerage Simplification Act of 2015”
HR 1317, a bill amending clearing requirements
HR 1334, the “Holding Company Registration Threshold Equalization Act of 2015”
HR 1525, the “Disclosure Modernization and Simplification Act of 2015”
HR 1675, the “Encouraging Employee Ownership Act of 2015”
HR 1723, the “Small Business Freedom and Growth Act of 2015”
HR 1847, the “Reforming Access for Investments in Startup Enterprises Act of 2015”
HR 1965, the “Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act”
H4 1975, which would make certain technical amendments to the Exchange Act
HR __, titled the “Improving Access to Capital for Emerging Growth Companies Act
We will be providing our perspective on the measures constituting a “JOBS Act 2.0” in an upcoming blog post.
