by Catherine McLean | Common Dreams
October 25 2011
WINTERTHUR, Switzerland – Here’s a gift to Occupy Wall Street protesters around the world: you now have scholarly proof that banks control the world.
The study says the United States takes home first prize with 24 companies cracking the list of the top 50 most powerful global firms. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, also known as ETH, have published a paper that argues just 147 companies account for a large chunk of the total economic value of all the transnational companies around the world. No exact dollar figures, but it’s obviously a vast sum.
Among the top 50 corporations, 45 operate within the financial industry. Barclays PLC is the most powerful, according to the ETH study, followed by such well-known names as JPMorgan Chase & Co., UBS AG, and Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.
The United States takes home first prize with 24 companies cracking the researchers’ top 50 list, followed by the U.K. with 8, France with 5, Japan with 4, and Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands tying with 2 companies each. Canada has one company in the researchers’ top 50: Sun Life Financial, Inc. secures the 35th spot.
The research shows “a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions,” authors Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston wrote in their study entitled: The network of global corporate control.
“This core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.”