[cduzz]

To be clear -- the stocks are not the potential liability.

You're talking about situations where people are borrowing shares and selling them, with the hope of buying the share back later to pay back the borrowed share. Obviously that's a bad scene if you borrow / sell the share and then it goes from $20 to $20,000,000,000.... Your liability in these scenarios is infinite, but it is also part of the trading system to manage those exploding liabilities.

If you buy a property, and it turns out that property is a former toxic waste dump, you own that liability from that asset. What you thought would make a wonderful daycare is now going to cost you millions to remediate.

If you buy into a partnership, and one of the other partners does a silly thing and now the partnership owes someone millions, you're on the hook for that.

If you buy a stock, your liability is the money you've invested in the stock, which is why stocks are such a wonderful innovation (as seen from a 1400's perspective where debts are paid back by all owners).