Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

IPO filings. month by month, when graphed as above yield a very volatile line, much more volatile than the S&P 500 index represented by the overlain blue curve there.  Nonetheless, the recent collapse in the quantity of IPO filings by United States companies is remarkable. As you see, in late 2007 and in the early months of 2008 the IPO market almost disappeared entirely.  But the line was headed back up BEFORE the worst of the crisis. The worst, you may remember, began with the bankruptcy of Lehman and the sale of Merrill Lynch for a fire sale price. That was in mid September 2008, during the upswing in IPO rates you see in the middle of the graph. Simplifying greatly, there was a high in 2010, a month with 35 IPOs, and a lot of lows later that year and throughout 2011.  Then a recovery getting above 40 IPOs per month a couple of times in 2013 and again in 2014. Since then, though ... collapse, fairly consistently month to month. ONLY THREE IPO FILINGS ...

The prohibition of pyramid schemes does not amount to a prohibition of all multi-level marketing (MLM). Tupperware lawfully sells storage and serving products branded with its name and the well-known “burp” on the one hand. It also lawfully offers to some individuals the right to offer its products to other potential customers in return for initial entry costs (in effect, purchasing a Tupperware franchise) on the other. That much is uncontroversial. Nor is the sale of a Tupperware franchise a security requiring registration as such. Where controversy begins to enter the picture is when these individuals are themselves empowered to sell the right to sell the product to third parties, creating another downstream level, and where the second level retailer not only thereafter gets a commission from the sale of the company’s products herself; she gets a share of the downstream profits: she shares in the proceeds of sales made by individuals she recruited to be sales people. This k...