It’s not a conspiracy! Elite controls global economy
http://rt.com/news/global-elite-economy-conspiracy-427/
Published: 22 October, 2011, 09:29
A man dressed as an "evil banker" stands outside
Saint Paul's Cathedral in central London as
protestors gather on October 15, 2011 (AFP Photo / Leon Neal)
Bankers really do control the world! That’s
according to Swiss researchers who, in an
exhaustive scientific study, mapped out a
blueprint showing the real architects of global economic power.
From freemasons to the Council on Foreign
Relations to Bilderberg, the belief that
secretive groups control the world’s economic and
political system are quite possibly as old as human civilization itself.
But while Occupy Wall Street protestors may be
slightly exaggerating in calling themselves the
99 per cent, a recent study conducted by the
Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich shows
that they aren’t too far off the mark. Drawing
from a 2007 Orbis database, which lists 37
million companies and investors spanning the
globe, the researchers focused on 43,000
transnational corporations and the share
ownership which connected them. Based on their
analysis, the Swiss team found that a core of
companies, the majority of which are in the
banking sector, yield excessive power over the
global economy, the weekly New Scientist magazine reports.
Within this group, 1,318 companies with
intertwined ownership structures were on average
connected to 20 other companies.
Representing some 20 per cent of global operating
revenues, the study also shows this group of
1,318 controls the bulk of the largest blue chip
and manufacturing firms. In terms of the real
economy – the part which produces actual goods
and services – they take in some 60 per cent of global revenues.
The team was further able to break down this
group into what they described as a
“super-entity” of 147 companies that controls
some 40 per cent of the network’s wealth.
"In effect, less than one per cent of the
companies were able to control 40 per cent of the
entire network," says James Glattfelder, one of
the researchers behind the study, as cited by the New Scientist.
And when it comes to the top 50 groups within the
super-entity, more than a few would be familiar
to those who have been camping out in downtown Manhattan over the last month.
Bank of America Corporation, Morgan Stanley,
Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Merrill Lynch & Co Inc,
and JP Morgan Chase & Co were included among the top 25.
Quick to dismiss criticism that they are merely
concocting another conspiracy theory, Glattfelder
insists that their research is evidence-based.
"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, "he said, as cited by the weekly.
Money makes money
The most recent study of the Swiss researchers
builds on past economic theories which also
recognized such systemic concentrations of wealth.
In 1906, an Economist named Vilfredo Pareto
discovered that around 20 per cent of the
population in his native Italy controlled around
80 per cent of the land. This observation has
come to be known as Pareto's Principle.
Pareto also found that while individual ratios of
wealth and control might vary from country to
country, the actual distribution is always the
same. That is to say, natural wealth, regardless
of human effort, tends to accumulate rather than
spread around. That accumulation leads to wealth
condensation, a theory more commonly understood
as the idea that money makes money. And if less
than one per cent of the surveyed companies
control 40 per cent of the network, it appears
that a slim few have managed to concentrate an
astronomical level of wealth into their few hands.
For the researchers, however, the issue of wealth
concentration is less important than how deeply the network is integrated.
As the 2008 financial crisis has shown, when a
relatively small group yields tremendous power
over the global economy, their mistakes will ripple across the world.
Ultimately, those invested in studying the
network which controls the bigger part of our
world economy hope that through greater
understanding, they will be able to make the financial system more stable.
For example, Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New
England Complex Systems Institute, has suggested
taxing firms if their interconnectivity becomes
excessive in order to discourage risk, the New
Scientists reports. Others have proposed global
anti-trust laws to help regulate the level of connectivity.
One question not answered by the study is just
how much political power the financial elite are
able to wield. John Driffill, a macroeconomics
expert at the University of London, told the New
Scientist that the interests of 147 companies
would most likely be too diverse to sustain collusion.
But while the capitalist network which controls
our economy might not be an active conspiracy,
they will inevitably have some interests that
correspond. The desire to fight any attempts to
regulate the network most likely remains a point they can all agree on.
Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world
Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world
19 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=158854#158854
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capi...
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).
"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. Bar-Yam 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 companies
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
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
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Fear not therefore: for there is nothing covered
that shall not be revealed; and nothing hid that
shall not be made known. What I tell you in
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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