10-24-2011, 05:01 AM
REVEALED –
THE CAPITALIST NETWORK THAT RUNS THE WORLD
Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...world.html
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
THE GOLDMAN SACHS GOODFELLAS
Dave Hodges
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hodges/dave115.htm
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. David Rockefeller, Memoirs
It is no secret that Goldman Sachs runs Wall Street. Even Ray Charles could see that that Goldman Sachs runs our government as evidenced by the former Goldman Sachs gangsters who have run our economy into the ground (e.g., Clintons Secretary of Treasury Goldman Sachs Rubin, Bushs Secretary of Treasury Goldman Sachs too big to fail Paulson, Goldman Sachs and Tiny Tim Geithner presently serves as Obamas Secretary of Treasury, etc.)
Goldman Sachs dominates the Federal Reserve. Goldman Sachs dominates the World Bank. Goldman Sachs dominates the IMF. Goldman Sachs dominates the New York Stock Exchange. And now Goldman Sachs is running the European financial system into the ground as another Goldman Sachs boy, super Mario Monti, who has taken over Italy to finish off what is left of the Italian financial system. Monti is also the head of the European Trilateral Commission as well as a Bilderberger. And yet another Goldman Sachs boy is finishing off the job in Greece .
Todays events parallel the imperialists of the early 20thcentury which resulted in World War I. The Wall Street led depression of the 1930s led to the rise of political extremism and ultimately to World War II. Today, Goldman Sachs and their fellow Wall Street cronies are currently running, or dare I say ruining the global economy and the consequences are going to result in the culmination of World War III from which these same gangster banksters will profit from the buildup, the death and destruction of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of innocent people as well as the lucrative clean up which follows every war. However, the ultimate prize for the coming war will be the ruination of the planet in order to reconstruct civilization in a true fascist model that Hitler and Mussolini could only dream about. Remember, as the globalists like to say in reference to their favorite Hegelian Dialectic quote, Out of chaos comes order. Mind you, it wont be Goldman Sachs money that pays for the destruction of humanity in the coming war. This wars blood money will be your money and my money. Mind you, it wont be Goldman Sachs children who are pressed into military service and will be sacrificed in the coming conflict. It will be your children and my children who will be sacrificed in the name of furthering the bottom line of the Goldman Sachs Mafia and the rest of the Wall Street gangsters. Meanwhile, the Goldman Sachs children will be safely tucked away attending private schools on your nickel and on the blood of your children as the devastation begins to unfold.
When that Wall Street sock puppet, Barack Hussein Obama, gave Israel permission to attack Iran , the dominoes leading to the next world war have begun to topple as Russia will surely come to the aid of its trading partner, Iran . And Russia has already moved warships into place to protect Syria from attack by NATO. Germany , except for Merkel, is taking a stand against this international banking cartels planned economic destruction of Europe , courtesy of Wall Streets derivative debt.
A growing number of experts feel that Germany may leave the EU and will join forces with Russia as evidenced by the recent series of trade and manufacturing agreements between the two countries. This could mark the breakup of NATO and leave American and British forces on their own, to fight the coming war. This is exactly what these banksters desire, which is the destruction of America and her military might. America will prove to be the last man standing on this corrupt march toward a bankster dominated New World Order and we Americans must be taken down, and taken down with a vengeance, in order to achieve this end.
This swath of international destruction being promulgated by Goldman Sachs is also being visited upon the daily lives of the American public here at home. Courtesy of the Goldman Sachs gangsters, there are no more safe financial havens for American citizens. Your bank account, your pension fund, your investment accounts and your home mortgages are no longer safe. These collective funds are not at risk because of the risk of falling victim to the failing economy as much as these funds are subject to confiscation by Goldman Sachs and its shell corporations along with the complicit support of the federal government. A clear case in point lies in the recent happenings in MF Global.
MF Global, a shell corporation beholding to Goldman Sachs, was led to the slaughter by the former Goldman Sachs executive and former New Jersey Governor and senator, John Corzine.
Corzines criminal actions have directly victimized 35,000 Americans by stealing an estimated $900 million dollars of his clients money from their supposedly secure private account. There is also another $600 million missing dollars from MF Global. Meanwhile, Corzine avoids sharing a prison cell with Bernie Madoff by purchasing a get-out-of-jail card through the sponsorship of a $35,000 per plate fundraiser for that great Wall Street puppet, Barack Hussein Obama. And what are the government watch dogs doing to protect our money from this new generation of robber barons? The short answer is that the feds are partners with Goldman Sachs in this monumental violation of the public trust.
THE CAPITALIST NETWORK THAT RUNS THE WORLD
Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...world.html
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
THE GOLDMAN SACHS GOODFELLAS
Dave Hodges
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hodges/dave115.htm
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. David Rockefeller, Memoirs
It is no secret that Goldman Sachs runs Wall Street. Even Ray Charles could see that that Goldman Sachs runs our government as evidenced by the former Goldman Sachs gangsters who have run our economy into the ground (e.g., Clintons Secretary of Treasury Goldman Sachs Rubin, Bushs Secretary of Treasury Goldman Sachs too big to fail Paulson, Goldman Sachs and Tiny Tim Geithner presently serves as Obamas Secretary of Treasury, etc.)
Goldman Sachs dominates the Federal Reserve. Goldman Sachs dominates the World Bank. Goldman Sachs dominates the IMF. Goldman Sachs dominates the New York Stock Exchange. And now Goldman Sachs is running the European financial system into the ground as another Goldman Sachs boy, super Mario Monti, who has taken over Italy to finish off what is left of the Italian financial system. Monti is also the head of the European Trilateral Commission as well as a Bilderberger. And yet another Goldman Sachs boy is finishing off the job in Greece .
Todays events parallel the imperialists of the early 20thcentury which resulted in World War I. The Wall Street led depression of the 1930s led to the rise of political extremism and ultimately to World War II. Today, Goldman Sachs and their fellow Wall Street cronies are currently running, or dare I say ruining the global economy and the consequences are going to result in the culmination of World War III from which these same gangster banksters will profit from the buildup, the death and destruction of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of innocent people as well as the lucrative clean up which follows every war. However, the ultimate prize for the coming war will be the ruination of the planet in order to reconstruct civilization in a true fascist model that Hitler and Mussolini could only dream about. Remember, as the globalists like to say in reference to their favorite Hegelian Dialectic quote, Out of chaos comes order. Mind you, it wont be Goldman Sachs money that pays for the destruction of humanity in the coming war. This wars blood money will be your money and my money. Mind you, it wont be Goldman Sachs children who are pressed into military service and will be sacrificed in the coming conflict. It will be your children and my children who will be sacrificed in the name of furthering the bottom line of the Goldman Sachs Mafia and the rest of the Wall Street gangsters. Meanwhile, the Goldman Sachs children will be safely tucked away attending private schools on your nickel and on the blood of your children as the devastation begins to unfold.
When that Wall Street sock puppet, Barack Hussein Obama, gave Israel permission to attack Iran , the dominoes leading to the next world war have begun to topple as Russia will surely come to the aid of its trading partner, Iran . And Russia has already moved warships into place to protect Syria from attack by NATO. Germany , except for Merkel, is taking a stand against this international banking cartels planned economic destruction of Europe , courtesy of Wall Streets derivative debt.
A growing number of experts feel that Germany may leave the EU and will join forces with Russia as evidenced by the recent series of trade and manufacturing agreements between the two countries. This could mark the breakup of NATO and leave American and British forces on their own, to fight the coming war. This is exactly what these banksters desire, which is the destruction of America and her military might. America will prove to be the last man standing on this corrupt march toward a bankster dominated New World Order and we Americans must be taken down, and taken down with a vengeance, in order to achieve this end.
This swath of international destruction being promulgated by Goldman Sachs is also being visited upon the daily lives of the American public here at home. Courtesy of the Goldman Sachs gangsters, there are no more safe financial havens for American citizens. Your bank account, your pension fund, your investment accounts and your home mortgages are no longer safe. These collective funds are not at risk because of the risk of falling victim to the failing economy as much as these funds are subject to confiscation by Goldman Sachs and its shell corporations along with the complicit support of the federal government. A clear case in point lies in the recent happenings in MF Global.
MF Global, a shell corporation beholding to Goldman Sachs, was led to the slaughter by the former Goldman Sachs executive and former New Jersey Governor and senator, John Corzine.
Corzines criminal actions have directly victimized 35,000 Americans by stealing an estimated $900 million dollars of his clients money from their supposedly secure private account. There is also another $600 million missing dollars from MF Global. Meanwhile, Corzine avoids sharing a prison cell with Bernie Madoff by purchasing a get-out-of-jail card through the sponsorship of a $35,000 per plate fundraiser for that great Wall Street puppet, Barack Hussein Obama. And what are the government watch dogs doing to protect our money from this new generation of robber barons? The short answer is that the feds are partners with Goldman Sachs in this monumental violation of the public trust.