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Look up who these people are and ask them questions!!
Just found this on my little foray into web-life. It's now at an end, meaning I can't currently discuss it, but I thought that if I put it up then people could be digesting the info, if they'd not known it before that is. I'll write on it tomorrow, but for now am off to bed...
Study Says World's Stocks Controlled by Select Few
Companies from US, UK and Australia have the most concentrated financial power.
Aug 25, 2009
By Lauren Schenkman
Inside Science News Service
View full-size image
WASHINGTON -- A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system's vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.
"You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense," Glattfelder said. “From that you're able to ... unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn't at all important."
The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston's analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.
“If you would look at this locally, it's always distributed,” Glattfelder said. “If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it's the same guys, [which] is not something you'd expect from the local view.”
Matthew Jackson, an economist from Stanford University in Calif. who studies social and economic networks, said that Glattfelder and Battiston's approach could be used to answer more pointed questions about corporate control and how companies interact.
"It's clear, looking at financial contagion and recent crises, that understanding interrelations between companies and holdings is very important in the future,” he said. "Certainly people have some understanding of how large some of these financial institutions in the world are, there's some feeling of how intertwined they are, but there's a big difference between having an impression and actually having ... more explicit numbers to put behind it."
Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are “big fish” in the most countries. The biggest fish was the Capital Group Companies, with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied. In identifying these major players, the physicists accounted for secondary ownership -- owning stock in companies who then owned stock in another company -- in an attempt to quantify the potential control a given agent might have in a market.
The results raise questions of where and when a company could choose to exert this influence, but Glattfelder and Battiston are reluctant to speculate.
"In this kind of science, complex systems, you're not aiming at making predictions [like] ... where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time," Battiston said. “What you're trying to estimate is … the potential influence that [an investor] has."
Glattfelder added that the internationalism of these powerful companies makes it difficult to gauge their economic influence. "[With] new company structures which are so big and spanning the globe, it's hard to see what they're up to and what they're doing,” he said. Large, sparse networks dominated by a few major companies could also be more vulnerable, he said. "In network speak, if those nodes fail, that has a big effect on the network."
The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review E.
Study Says World's Stocks Controlled by Select Few
Companies from US, UK and Australia have the most concentrated financial power.
Aug 25, 2009
By Lauren Schenkman
Inside Science News Service
View full-size image
WASHINGTON -- A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system's vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.
"You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense," Glattfelder said. “From that you're able to ... unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn't at all important."
The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston's analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.
“If you would look at this locally, it's always distributed,” Glattfelder said. “If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it's the same guys, [which] is not something you'd expect from the local view.”
Matthew Jackson, an economist from Stanford University in Calif. who studies social and economic networks, said that Glattfelder and Battiston's approach could be used to answer more pointed questions about corporate control and how companies interact.
"It's clear, looking at financial contagion and recent crises, that understanding interrelations between companies and holdings is very important in the future,” he said. "Certainly people have some understanding of how large some of these financial institutions in the world are, there's some feeling of how intertwined they are, but there's a big difference between having an impression and actually having ... more explicit numbers to put behind it."
Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are “big fish” in the most countries. The biggest fish was the Capital Group Companies, with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied. In identifying these major players, the physicists accounted for secondary ownership -- owning stock in companies who then owned stock in another company -- in an attempt to quantify the potential control a given agent might have in a market.
The results raise questions of where and when a company could choose to exert this influence, but Glattfelder and Battiston are reluctant to speculate.
"In this kind of science, complex systems, you're not aiming at making predictions [like] ... where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time," Battiston said. “What you're trying to estimate is … the potential influence that [an investor] has."
Glattfelder added that the internationalism of these powerful companies makes it difficult to gauge their economic influence. "[With] new company structures which are so big and spanning the globe, it's hard to see what they're up to and what they're doing,” he said. Large, sparse networks dominated by a few major companies could also be more vulnerable, he said. "In network speak, if those nodes fail, that has a big effect on the network."
The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review E.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kerry-Ann Howitt on -
Well I've re-read it, and it still doesn't make much sense. But then, isn't that the way they've always gotten away with it??
The thing to remember with stuff like this (as with the infrastructure of Freemasonry), is that the mass majority of people who work for these companies won't actually benefit from the procedures put in to place. It's the people who own the company, not who run it, that the company is run for the benefit of. No-one ever says 'I'm going to set up a business purely for the benefit of other people, I refuse to earn a bean from it'.
It's the same the world over, and the same for the world. Our daily lives are run for us, by the same people who own the corporations and in the same way, for the same reasons. Their own personal profit.
I'm sorry to pull the old Satan card again, but I'm sure that a lot of these people proclaim to be followers of some type of Jesus-based religion. The same Jesus who quite clearly states in the Bible that the pursuit of personal wealth is the opposite of God, yet whom millions claim to have been 'saved' by already, despite the fact that we didn't listen to a fucking word the poor bloke said.
Sorry for the swearing, it gets me irate. When will we learn the basics I wonder?
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Permalink Reply by hippymummy on -
It's telling us everything we need to know without commiting to anything isn't it? The poor barstewards have realised half way through what's really going on with the world economy, realised that the ones in sunglasses hiding well out of sight are actually the ones who're paying for their research and the wages down at their lowly step on the ladder - which is so high up that it's waaaay out of our sight up in the clouds somewhere, heck, even the giant'd be feeling sick at that altitude (did you like that one Kez? Hee Hee) - resulting in a back skuttle and make vague references in £investment banker" lingo and buggers off sharpish to research something MUCH safer! Whadddya think?
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Permalink Reply by Kerry-Ann Howitt on
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Exactly the same as you Baby-Doll!!
Well bloody done girl!
Luv U! xXx
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