
Dole Food Had Too Many Shares - lifeisstillgood
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-17/dole-food-had-too-many-shares
======
lifeisstillgood
Look at it this way - Dole foods has people who think they own more 10,000,000
shares than exist. And this is not because of shenanigans about Dole
specifically but the "usual" operations of finance (shorting, being lax about
what ownership and beneficial ownership means, in ways that would have knife
fights in any real world situation)

but imagine, just quickly, that all the shares in all the world had to be
registered - let's say some awesome tax avoidance measure. And when all the
people who think they own stuff find out that they cannot own stuff because
there was not enough shares to go round.

Does this mean the global wealth just drops? Does this mean that we just
assign them some monetary value (effectively they "borrowed" that much stock
value)

Or what?

Basically there is no double entry bookkeeping for shares - there is for share
transactions ... but the DTC "chill" is an example of foul up.

No imagine we create a global online ledger - suddenly these problems become
manifest. Fun times

------
lifeisstillgood
I am clearly posting waaay too many Bloomberg notes but this one - this one is
beautiful

If after reading this you don't want to throw out the whole stock clearing
system and migrate to some basic ledger then you did not read it right

