By Jack Garson
The JOBS Act promotes investments in small businesses
On April 5, 2012, the new Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups Act became law. The primary purpose of the JOBS Act is to reduce the legal burdens that small businesses face in raising capital.
With this new law, the pendulum has now swung once again toward deregulation, and rather quickly at that. In the wake of the Enron scandal and, later, the financial meltdown on Wall Street in 2008, Congress passed a variety of restrictions on the financial world. First the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and then the Dodd-Frank Act imposed new regulations, including burdensome disclosure requirements for publicly traded companies. These laws were layered on top of the securities acts passed in the 1930s, largely as a consequence of another couple of economic boo-boos: the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. (more…)