C'punks, On Wed, 22 Jun 1994, Robert Hettinga wrote:
. . . physical delivery is becoming more and more obsolete. That makes sense. Once a certificate is put into the vault at DTC, it usually never leaves. It might as well not be there at all. Changes in ownership are reflected by offseting book entries. Ah, the wonders of double-entry bookeeping.
Oddly enough, an e$ certification scheme reverses that paradigm. The book entries disapear, the certificates proliferate, and the clearinghouse becomes a referee, "blessing" the trade.
I don't think so. The book entries still exist. The book is the only place securities ever really exist. E$ certificates--and even physical certificates--are nothing more than receipts evidencing ownership as defined by the book entry. Remember, securities are "intangible" assets by definition. (Ditto for dollars, yen, pounds and francs, by the way.) S a n d y