The SEC is proposing to alter the quarterly reporting requirement for registered companies; presently all must file a form 10-Q showing inter alia company quarterly financials.  The current proposal is to require financials only twice a year.  This revision is consistent with President Trump’s long-stated agenda and purports to encourage more public offerings.

In my personal view this step towards providing less information to the public makes little sense.  First, experience in the capital markets for decades has taught me that investors want more information, not less, and investors respond almost immediately to each iota of information that may be predictive of future performance (witness the daily trading triggered by the current state of affairs in the Middle East).  And the dynamics leading to a public offering, to my experience, do not turn on whether the reporting regime calls for quarterly versus semi-annual financials; and, the pressure for information will remain regardless of SEC reporting requirements.  The current regime for SEC reporting, even after any adoption of this new proposal, remains intrusive and substantial and while in some instances the promise of public scrutiny bears on the decision to undertake public registration, that decision turns on broader issues and not on this detail.

In some sense the unwinding of the granular administrative state, if that is your goal, is advanced by small as well as large steps; nonetheless this proposed tweak strikes this observer as trivial and unwise.