Surprise! Banks really do control wealth, researchers find

Those 99 per centers who are occupying Wall St. may be right after all.

The banks really do own the world — or at least much of it.

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, also known as ETH, set out to figure out who controls the world’s wealth, and whether the belief that it’s in the hands of a few powerful corporations is true.

Their study says it’s been hard to prove because many companies “exert control over other firms via a web of direct and indirect ownership relations which extends over many countries.”

They began with a list of 43,060 transnational corporations identified, according to the OECD definition, using a sample of about 30 million individuals and companies.

And using complicated mathematical models, they developed a network of ownership pathways originating from and pointing to the companies.

The result is a list of the 50 top global firms, and not surprisingly financial institutions make up almost the entire list though no exact figures are included.

“Many of the names are well-known global players,” says the report. “The interest of this ranking is not that it exposes unsuspected powerful players. Instead, it shows that many of the top actors belong to the core.

“This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but, on the contrary, they are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control.”

Barclays tops the list and financial institutions in the top 10 include Capital Group Companies Inc., State Street Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Co., UBS AG and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.

The list is dominated by U.S. and European companies including British, German, French and Swiss firms. The only Canadian company on the list is Sun Life Financial Inc., ranked at 35.

Origin
Source: Toronto Star