"Larry Summers May Have Just Violated Square's pre-IPO Quiet Period" is the headline over an article in Business Insider.
It made me chuckle simply because of the tension inherent in imposing a "quiet period" on the voluble Professor Summers.
But there's a serious point here, which is that if the SEC's regulations are so complex or silly that not even Mr. Summers — a former Treasury secretary and Harvard president and economics professor — can't obey them, maybe they should be rethought. The idea that markets should have less information from a company in the run-up to an initial public offering has always struck me as an error on the scale of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance idea that there should be less leeway to run political campaign commercials in the 60 days prior to an election. These are moments, political and financial, where more speech and information is better, not less.
This would be a good Gordon Crovitz column for Monday's Wall Street Journal.
