Topic summary
Ownership equity
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Equity (finance).
Legal foundations
When the owners of a firm are shareholders, their interest is called shareholders' equity. It is the difference between a company's assets and liabilities, and can be negative. If all shareholders are in one class, they share equally in ownership equity from all perspectives. It is not uncommon for companies to issue more than one class of stock, with each class having its own liquidation priority or voting rights. This complicates analysis for both stock valuation and accounting.