Administrator DKT27 Posted October 24, 2011 Administrator Share Posted October 24, 2011 AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates.""It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest. The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies1. Barclays plc2. Capital Group Companies Inc3. FMR Corporation4. AXA5. State Street Corporation6. JP Morgan Chase & Co7. Legal & General Group plc8. Vanguard Group Inc9. UBS AG10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc11. Wellington Management Co LLP12. Deutsche Bank AG13. Franklin Resources Inc14. Credit Suisse Group15. Walton Enterprises LLC16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp17. Natixis18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc19. T Rowe Price Group Inc20. Legg Mason Inc21. Morgan Stanley22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc23. Northern Trust Corporation24. Société Générale25. Bank of America Corporation26. Lloyds TSB Group plc27. Invesco plc28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company31. Aviva plc32. Schroders plc33. Dodge & Cox34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*35. Sun Life Financial Inc36. Standard Life plc37. CNCE38. Nomura Holdings Inc39. The Depository Trust Company40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance41. ING Groep NV42. Brandes Investment Partners LP43. Unicredito Italiano SPA44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan45. Vereniging Aegon46. BNP Paribas47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc48. Resona Holdings Inc49. Capital Group International Inc50. China Petrochemical Group Company* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset usedGraphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bgood Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 WOW!..it's actually become more diversified..in the 70's had came across some research and the numbers were in the low 20 something of who owned what..like on the back of a label say Campbell Soup a division of proctor gamble being a division of ITT or ?..yea i know if i could spell it this would seem a bit more believable.Who would of thunk it Disney owned by GE? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ambrocious Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 These lists ALWAYS leave out the heads of the Hydra.1: Royal Family's of 13 (Unknown who exactly rules this, some say the Rothschild's. 13 Families, also known as houses, rule over and govern over all of mankind secretly.)2: Bilderberg Group (list of participants of this secretive organization)3: Council on Foreign Relations (Each country has their own version of this, this is the United States.)4: Kings, Queens, Presidents, Prime Ministers and so forth.For more information on these secret organizations, either watch "Wake Up Call" or "ENDGAME: Blueprint For Global Enslavement". Those two are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.P.S. Don't take these as if they are conspiracy theories....they most certainly ARE NOT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karachidude Posted October 26, 2011 Share Posted October 26, 2011 just seen some videos bout this Rothschild Family,they are really freakin rich :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toyo Posted October 26, 2011 Share Posted October 26, 2011 I'm richer... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karachidude Posted October 26, 2011 Share Posted October 26, 2011 I'm richer...yes and i slay dragons for a living :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toyo Posted October 26, 2011 Share Posted October 26, 2011 I'm richer...yes and i slay dragon for a living :lol:That's how I got all my money... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karachidude Posted October 26, 2011 Share Posted October 26, 2011 I'm richer...yes and i slay dragon for a living :lol:That's how I got all my money...offcourse u have..these muggles must be thinking we joking or something,they would never understand :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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