Sure it's not a favorable buyout environment and sure tech companies can run thinner than they used to.

But the debacle at Enron was the main forcing function behind the Sarbannes-Oxley act. Sarb-Ox in turn significantly raised accounting standards, but also the cost of financial and audit compliance in public companies

An unintended consequence of Sarb-Ox was a severe drop in IPOs. The compliance costs for a public company means you need to be big and profitable before you IPO. Compliance for even a small-ish public company used to be marginal but now can be several million dollars a year.

A decent rule of thumb USED to be that you could have $25M in revenue and no profits and still expect a decent IPO- but now the compliance costs of being public imlpy you need to have $100M in revenue and 4 quarters of profit an before IPO makes any sense- otherwise you'd be devoting like 10% of your revenue and maybe all your gross profit to accounting compliance.

Makes me worry about the subprime crisis. What sort of over-reactive regulation will result from the subprime crisis, and what will the unintended consequences of that be?