The leveraged buyout boom is making investment bankers and private equity executives rich, but is costing the New York Stock Exchange dearly, according to a published report yesterday.

The Big Board, in the middle of a bitter listings war with more nimble electronic trading rivals such as Nasdaq, has seen nearly $39 billion worth of listings evaporate last year, according to the Financial Times.

This flight acts as a double-whammy, since the sought after and profitable listings of initial public offerings are also fleeing American shores for the more lightly regulated likes of the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

For its part, Nasdaq lost $11 billion in listings to so-called de-equitization, almost two times more than the electronic exchange lost in 2005.

The trend of removing more listings does not look to be going away soon.

U.S. exchanges saw $97 billion worth of public equity value get taken private, versus $41 billion in IPO listings, according to the FT report.

A report released last month by The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation argued that one of the primary factors hurting America’s traditional dominance in capital creation are sections of the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms.

Specifically, the group targeted SOX for the burdens it places on small corporations from an accounting perspective.

U.S. and U.K. private equity players, whose coffers are bulging with billions of dollars of institutional and pension funds, can hardly be blamed for their prodigious appetites.

The interest-rate cycle – where historically low rates have made corporate debt issuance cheap – has allowed private equity firms to profitably purchase corporate earnings.