Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act
Floor Speech
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The Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act is an important bill that I believe will allow more capital to go and flow to small business so they can create jobs.
You know, at a time when we have 7.3 percent unemployment, and underemployment over 10 percent, we have a need for more capital to flow into our businesses so they can create jobs.
Meanwhile, the Dodd-Frank Act created burdensome new SEC registration on private equity firms but, as the gentleman from Connecticut said earlier, not on venture capital firms that do exactly the same thing. So, in fact, I would argue that venture capital firms have more risk than private equity.
There already are important protections, consumer protections, around private equity. You have to be a sophisticated, accredited investor, and there is already important fraud detection and fraud enforcement actions that are available to the SEC in the cases of these investors being taken advantage of.
So at a time when private equity is helping provide over 6 million jobs in America, we should be doing everything we can to actually encourage more activity by private equity, to encourage more jobs in America, not burdening them with big regulations.
I want to just make four quick points. These middle-market private equity firms, like we have in towns like Columbus, Ohio, where I live, contribute a lot toward job creation, but not a lot toward systemic risk.
And the compliance costs for these smaller firms in towns like Columbus, Ohio, will be especially high as a percentage; and it could drive many of them out of business.
Many of these firms that manage both SBIC and non-SBIC funds already face multiple layers of regulation.
And the fourth point is many of these investment adviser rules are not really pertinent to private equity funds.
So I stand in support of the Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act. I want to thank the gentleman from Virginia, Representative Hurt, for his hard work on this. I think it is a win for job creation, and I urge all my colleagues to support it.
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