A new in-depth study looks to have confirmed what many of us have suspected: a small group companies, principally banks and hedge funds, have highly concentrated power over the global economy and control much of the world's wealth. These entities, which the study's scientists characterize as a "backbone" of finance, control as much as 80% any country's capital market yet are run by a surprisingly few number of stockholders.
James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, theoreticians from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich, used mathematical modeling usually reserved for studying nature (such as weather patterns) and a huge international corporate database of over 85 million companies (Orbis 2007) in their study. They were able to reveal patterns of ownership and control among more than 43,000 multinational (AKA transnational) corporations that reveal what the OWS have been trying to let the world know: it's all in the hands of just a few people - the 1%.
Glattfelder and Battiston discovered a core of 1,318 companies with related and interlocking ownership which they mapped in a graphic showing the varying influence and ownership using point sizes and color.
Yet within this small group, they discovered that a yet smaller core of 147 businesses, they call a "super-entity", that controlled 40% of the wealth of the entire network of related companies.
The top ten of the 147:
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
This concentration of control reveals the precarious nature of the stability of the world's economy as shown by the near world economic collapse of 2008. If one of these companies falls, the rest are at best at risk of falling in turn. This is the real domino theory.
This information certainly is useful in bucking up the arguments of OWS and the 99%, but I for one would be surprised to see this story on MSM.
Further reading can be found here:
Econophysicists identify world's top 10 most powerful companies
http://arxivblog.com/...
Study Aug 2009:
Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control
http://arxiv.org/...