Where does veil collide?

I. Maurice Wormser's 1912 article Piercing the Veil of Corporate Entity named a metaphor already at work in the courts: the corporate veil is the legal line that treats a company as a person distinct from the shareholders who own it, so that their liability is normally limited to what they invested. Wormser set out when courts will look past that line, or pierce the veil, to reach the people behind a company used to work a fraud or injustice, building on the separate legal personality confirmed in Salomon v. A. Salomon and Co. (1897). The referent is a doctrine about who is answerable for a company's debts and wrongs. It has nothing to do with a membrane on a mushroom, a device for reasoning about fairness, or the effect of money on prices.[1]

Unit

One company's legal separation from its owners, upheld or pierced in a given case

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed case by case by courts weighing factors such as thin capitalisation, fraud, and disregard of the corporate form

Arthur Cecil Pigou's 1949 book The Veil of Money put a name to a long-standing claim in classical economics: that money is a veil lying over the real economy of goods, labour, and capital, so that a change in the quantity of money moves the general price level but leaves real quantities unchanged in the long run. This is the neutrality of money, an idea Pigou traced to earlier writers including David Hume, and it underlies the classical split between real and monetary variables. The referent is a proposition about what money does and does not affect in an economy. It is unrelated to a fungal membrane, a company's legal shield, or a thought experiment about justice.[2]

Unit

A claim about money's effect on real versus nominal variables

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Examined through macroeconomic evidence on how changes in the money supply pass into prices as against output