A Handful of Companies Control the World

At least they control all the money–and one of them, the China Petrochemical Group, controls almost 40% of the world’s economy. Is this a conspiracy, or just good economics on their part? (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to these shows).

Is this what critics mean when they accuse Obama of "class warfare" for wanting to raise taxes on the rich? When Swiss economic researchers did a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs), they discovered that 787 firms control of 80% of the world economy and that a 147 corporations control 40% of that economy.

On the PlanetSave website, Michael Ricciardi quotes the authors of the analysis as saying, "We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant ‘bow-tie structure’ (referring to the shape that forms when the assets of these corporations are graphed) and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. "A quantitative investigation is not a trivial task because firms may exert control over other firms via a web of direct and indirect ownership relations which extends over many countries. Therefore, a complex network analysis is needed in order to uncover the structure of control and its implications."

This helps explain the types of money problems that ordinary people are having, so let’s hope we can find some way to change this in the future! (NOTE: You can save $3 on our beautiful crop circle calendar by using coupon 2012 by September 23).