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 specificall

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