What is to be done about AIM, the supposed market for new, high growth companies on which our entrepreneurial class would build businesses that will change the world?

Moribund might be a harsh word, but lacking in vigour, to say the least.

There are now only 700 companies even listed on AIM, the lowest for 20 years.

This comes amid a wider ongoing debate about the failure/regulatory inability of our big pension funds to invest in UK equities.

And a desperate urge from the political and business class to drive economic growth.

Once AIM seemed the partial answer to that.

Lately the chatter is that there will be a budget tax raid on AIM shares, which hardly seems what the doctor ordered.

The Times today warns that AIM is “in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling doom loop”.

On the one hand, if AIM can only survive as a tax break, it’s not fit for purpose in the first place. On the other, one wonders how many Labour MPs even know what AIM is, perhaps because no one has lobbied them to explain.

One major problem, we read, is that firms on AIM get only a quarter of the coverage from City analysts afforded to their Wall Street rivals. No wonder the shares are going nowhere.

One solution here must be better PR for AIM itself and its listed entities.

Maybe AIM needs one big, fresh, hit it can point to?

The London Stock Exchange Group owns AIM, but it hardly seems like a nurturing parent. If it died, would anyone senior at the LSEG care? (The LSEG insists it does care, indeed that it is “hugely proud of” and committed to AIM.)

But there is plainly a lack of competition here, multiple routes to market should exist.

The government gets this, but is self-aware enough to know that civil servants trying to run a stock market might invite mockery.

If AIM was sold off presumably the LSEG would have to agree to non-compete clauses, which might just leave it fearful of it turning into a success story.

As it is, it seems barely on the precipice of viability. And maybe not enough people care to stop its fall.

One market player puts it like this:

“The AIM market barely predates the dot.com bubble. This is but a fad. Its passing will not be mourned in popular Square Mile culture. It’s not Simpsons, or Gow’s or the Mithras. New technologies and market structures already exist to offer equivalence (for the most part, anyway) and a capital market should never be surviving only on tax breaks and subsidies.”

City folk and their PR people who care about AIM need to take serious issue with the above point, and show why AIM matters, and why it needs to endure.

Please send candidates for press release of the day to: Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com