AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world, science may have confirmed the 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 are extremely complex and it took these scientists years of analysis that relied on supercomputers to achieve.
The study revealed that a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships own and benefit from 60% of the entire revenues generated by global economies. The 1318 companies had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20.
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.
Identifying and disguising the architecture of global economic power is extremely complex. For instance, if i wished to disguise my controlling interest in Large Corporation A, I could, for instance, establish several corporations in tax free havens, having 49% of the shareholding in each ot these corporations, but overall, I would be a majority shareholder in the Large Corporation A. That is what these scientists set out to achieve. Who realy are the big movers and shakers:
This is not a "conspiracy theory", it is a scientific fact. If you doubt it go look at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
There is also a good article in the New Science at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
The owners of these vast extremes of wealth should be named and shamed.
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