Worst Year for U.S. IPOs Since Great Recession

American companies just aren’t going public like they used to. Only 49 companies headquartered in the US had completed public offerings through the third quarter, raising a combined $7.2 billion, according to data recently released by venture-capital research firm PitchBook. That’s a sharp decline from the same time last year, when 95 US companies had gone public, raising about $15 billion. This year is on track to be the worst year for US IPOs—in terms of both number of offerings and capital raised—since 2009, when the country was still emerging from recession.