Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader. I rise because in a moment we will be voting on the Reed-Landrieu-Levin substitute amendment. This legislation corrects glaring defects in the House-proposed bill on a so-called jobs bill. It protects investors. It allows capital formation, but it does not do that at the expense of investors.

We have taken all the major provisions of the House bill with respect to the IPO onramp. We have not deleted them, we have improved them. We have lowered the threshold in terms of the size of the business so these IPO onramps can be designed for small businesses, not for businesses of $1 billion in annual revenue.

We have gone ahead and looked at the aspects of regulation A in the House, and we agree there should be an increase in the limit from $5 million to $50 million. But we have made improvements. For example, the House bill will allow people to solicit these securities under regulation A without audited financials. I think at a minimum the investing public should have some audited financials to rely upon.

We have taken provisions with respect to the ability to go dark--the ability to stop reporting if you have 2,000 or less record owners--and we have raised the limit from the existing 1 to 750 beneficial owners. But we haven't opened it broadly so that large well-known companies could suddenly stop reporting their financial information on a routine basis.

We have looked at the reg D offerings in terms of a private offering versus a public offering, and we have given the Securities and Exchange Commission the ability, in this age of the Internet and of Twitter, to make adjustments so that a private offering under reg D would not be compromised because it gets into the media through Twitter, et cetera. But we haven't opened it to general solicitation, as the House bill does.

By the way, our bill actually tries to create jobs, not just opportunities to raise funds through Wall Street. With Senator Landrieu's help, we have strong small business provisions in there. We include the Ex-Im Bank provisions of Senator Cantwell. We worked very closely with Senators Merkley, Bennet, and Brown of Massachusetts to include a crowdfunding provision which is much superior.

If we do not achieve cloture, we will see, by default, a bad House bill on its way to becoming law.

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