US News

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.

DTC retains custody of more than 1.4 million active securities issues valued at US$87.1 trillion, including securities issued in the US and more than 131 countries and territories.

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.