Trusts

The trust, or more accurately, industrial trust, is a legal structure that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s in the United States as a mechanism for consolidating industries. A trust is a legal arrangement where property owners transfer control of their property to a separate entity—the “trust”—that manages the collected properties for the benefit of another party, which can be the original owners or someone else. Legal title to property is held by that one person or entity, the trustee, for the benefit of another, the beneficiary or beneficiaries. The trust structure was employed by industrial companies in the United States to establish economic monopolies over goods and services: All (or substantively all) participants in an industry would exchange their property for dividend-paying ownership shares ...