taggit Summary
John Coates, the acting director of the corporate finance division at the S.E.C., issued a lengthy statement yesterday about how securities laws apply to blank-check firms. In particular, he is interested in a crucial (and controversial) difference between SPACs and traditional I.P.O.s: blank-check firms are allowed to publish often-rosy financial forecasts when merging with an acquisition target, while companies going public in an I.P.O. Investors raise money for SPACs via an I.P.O., and those funds are used to merge with an unspecified company in the future, thereby taking it public. With traditional I.P.O.s, companies can’t issue such projections to prospective investors, because regulators consider it too risky for firms as yet untested by the public markets.