[Lazare]

> Whenever you have some instrument attacking Wall Street [...] papers come out trying to protect them. This does not mention drawbacks of the IPO the SPAC is getting rid of - the 6-7% investment banking fee, [...] the near 100% IPO pop due to which the company raises half of what it would have (amounting to a 50% fee so to say which goes into the pockets of institutional investors) amid other things.

SPACs have hefty investment banking fees, and, frequently, their own enormous pop. In the case of Nikola, the SPAC sold shares for $10 that traded up to $34 on the first day of trading, a 240% pop, and many other recent SPACs have had large pops. Every effort I've seen to evaluate the costs of SPACs has found them to be at least as expensive as IPOs. How could they not be? SPACs have to do their own IPO just to get started (with hefty fees), then they conduct a merger (with hefty fees), then there may be the sponsor promote, then there's the widely documented fact that most of the cash raised is returned to investors via redeptions, etc.

> An impartial cost-benefit analysis needs to be done which is sadly impossible for someone whose funding comes from the deep pockets of Wall Street

You literally wrote that in a comment on a paper doing an impartial cost-benefit analysis which was not funded by Wall Street.

Whatever advantages SPACs have, or may have in the future, the ones happening today are very expensive.