Some info on Dentzer
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-dentzer-helped-wall-street-unsnarl-its-paperwork-11613055610 (https://archive.ph/HthBH)
- https://susan-g-dentzer.medium.com/the-greatest-father-from-a-great-generation-f9ceb3758066
and a bit of a dive in to DTCC and how it works.
Through a series of complex legal frameworks pretty much all stocks are actually owned by DTCC. They hold the shared to all the publicly traded companies on the stock exchange through their Cede and Company subsidiary.
People who invest in stocks are given a security entitlement through a securities intermediary, i.e. a broker. So, DTCC owns the stocks, and they give out certificates to brokers to trade the shares. The brokers then resell the certificates to the beneficial owners.
Normally, none of this really matters, and it’s just an obscure legal mechanism nobody pays attention to. The time this does start to matter is when a bank or a brokerage goes bust, the way we saw during 2008 crash. At that point the securities go to the secure creditors who actually own them and not to the beneficial owners.
We’re at the monopoly stage of capitalism, so it’s not a big step to consider that they might all own each other. And why not, they own the government, after all. It’s one big club that we ain’t in.