Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/168

154 the United States and this does not take into account the very many other persons who own a distributive share in life insurance and other companies that may directly have railroad stocks as part of their assets. Nor does it take into account the large number of stock-holders whose holdings stand in the name of brokers as securities for loans.

There is some evidence respecting the ownership of corporate securities in the aggregate in that the dividends reported by income tax payers fall short of the estimates of dividends paid by corporations. The latter statistics are not fully reliable. I should hesitate to characterize them as being any more then roughly indicative. With due allowance for these uncertainties we may conservatively draw the deduction that about 75 per cent of the industrial property of the United States was owned by the income tax payers of 1916.

By making some bold assumptions we may now proceed to estimate the total holdings of the class that