And when new equity is part of raising capital, its normally as a complement to bond issues, to avoid over-leveraging.
As far as taking the place of common stocks for capital raisings, ChrisCook's units would seem to be a useful recourse: issue tradeable units on a particular revenue stream, and then the leverage is intrinsically lower than bond obligations, and the need to balance it with new equity to reduce the leverage substantially reduced.
But of course this is all in the context of "what the new revolutionary government does after taking power", because to abolish publicly traded corporations is to essential abolish the entire political economy of corporate capitalism, and the Powers That Be who are having a death sentence passed on their power will fight it with far greater unity and far greater ferocity than any of the reformist battles any of us have seen fought in the last few decades ... whether won or lost. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Quite so.
In Canada and Australia before that we saw units in 'Income Trusts' which emerged spontaneously, and were hugely popular with pension funds etc. These days we see the Master Limited Partnership which unitises revenues in a similar fashion.
This uses the Limited Partnership form, which, unlike the UK LLP or US LLC, has partners with limited liability (and little or no management control) and 'General Partners' with unlimited liability who manage the investment.
It's only a matter of time before people start using US LLCs and UK LLPs in exactly the way I advocate - indeed, they may have already done so - the Hilton Group created in the UK what I call a 'Capital Partnership' (>£1bn) but didn't 'unitise' the partnership interests, as far as I know.
We're getting loads of interest in Scotland up to and including ministers. Watch this space. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
