They’re still at it.

The Securities and Exchange Commission wants to make IPOs “great again,” and at the agency’s latest Small Business Forum, an annual gathering focused on capital-raising policy recommendations for small businesses and smaller public companies, SEC leaders as well as IPO and small cap experts shared thoughts on how to boost IPO activity in 2026.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, for his part, has previously proposed plans to encourage more IPOs, including cutting down on required disclosures and limiting shareholder proposals, per the New York Times. Some critics have said those measures could ultimately keep companies private longer.

At the meeting, held March 9 at SEC headquarters in DC, Atkins built upon some of those proposed ideas.

“One of my highest priorities with respect to the SEC’s disclosure rules is to scale the requirements with a company’s size and maturity,” he said. “Balancing disclosure obligations with a company’s ability to bear the burdens of compliance is particularly important where Congress has directed the SEC to promulgate a disclosure rule whose costs may have disproportionate impact on some companies.”

Atkins also added policy recommendations to the docket.

Keep reading.—NP

IPOs picked up in a big way last year, and early results hint that 2026 may also see more companies going public than last year, despite recent market volatility. That prospect will make sponsors eager to pounce when the IPO window is open. But many CFOs of PE-owned companies don’t think their organizations are ready to list yet—at least according to a new survey by private equity advisory firm Accordion.

Almost 60% of the 200 private equity sponsors polled in the survey, fielded in the US and UK in February 2026, believed that at least a quarter of their portfolio companies could go public in the next three years. But less than 20% of the 200 CFOs surveyed, all of whom were at PE-backed companies with revenues above $50 million, said they’d be actively preparing for an IPO in the next 12 months.

Accordion’s report revealed a lack of alignment between sponsors and CFOs on goals for an IPO. For sponsors, “IPO readiness is increasingly viewed as an extension of exit readiness,” report author Shauna Watson, head of the IPO readiness practice at Accordion, wrote, and want to see it “embedded into the operating model.” CFOs, on the other hand, view preparing for an IPO as something they only do once a clear direction has been set, according to Watson.

Keep reading.—CV

In this economy, the only thing making moves is our cortisol levels.

Economic uncertainty saw employers and workers pull out of the job market in 2025, leading to what’s since been described as a “no-hire, no-fire” labor market. New data shows that trend is continuing in 2026. Despite a slight uptick in job openings, labor turnover primarily continued to stagnate in January, per the latest job openings and labor turnover survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Diving into the data. Job openings rose to 6.9 million in January, up from 6.6 million in December. Openings increased the most in finance and insurance, by 184,000 to 313,000, while private educational services saw the steepest decline, by 28,000, to 129,000.

Total hires in January remained unchanged month over month at 5.3 million. Total hires rose the most in professional and business services, by 35,000, and fell the most in transportation, warehousing, and utilities, by 67,000.

But don’t hold out hope that the uptick in job openings in January will materialize into job growth. The opposite happened in February, when total employment declined by 92,000, per the BLS’s latest jobs report.

Keep reading on HR Brew.—PM

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.