In the category of "you would need more than a feather to knock me over" on hearing this news:
Swiss scientists have used supercomputers to trace through a database of 37 million corporations and their shareholders worldwide. They found that a core of 1318 companies control 80 percent of the world's wealth.
And, says the story in NewScientist,
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. (emphasis mine)
In other words, the top one percent of companies, most of which are banks and financial companies, own each other and 40 percent of the entire world. Kind of removes all the mystery from the question how they've managed to get tens of billions of dollars in bailouts from the US government, special tax breaks, subsidies and a regulatory system that doesn't even understand what they do, much less regulate them.
It's time to stop wasting our lives making these guys richer, wouldn't you say?
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