A Tiny Elite Owns 80% of the World's Wealth

Financial Tyranny: Defeating the Greatest Cover-Up of All Time (Excerpt)

The Federal Reserve appears to be at the epicenter of a vast “interlocking directorate” of companies that may earn up to 80 percent of all the world’s wealth.

January 13, 2012

Divine Cosmos - Ever since Benoit Mandelbrot discovered “fractals” in the 1970s, the fascinating new science of Chaos Theory has become a part of our collective knowledge base. Mandelbrot discovered a remarkable “geometry of nature” – in which highly complex systems can be reduced down to a few very simple ingredients.

What if we use this same science to “hack” the world’s economy with super-computers – and see how many corporations actually control it?

Three scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, led by James Glattfelder, recently did this – and their results were published in New Scientist, a respected science magazine. Glattfelder’s team unleashed this armada of supercomputers on Orbis 2007 -- a very elaborate database of the top 37 million corporations and individual investors worldwide.

The results were absolutely stunning.

A CORE OF 1,318 COMPANIES EARN 80 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S WEALTH

The Swiss scientists quickly found a total of 43,060 trans-national corporations in the Orbis 2007 database. From this group, Glattfelder’s team revealed that a ‘core’ of 1,318 companies directly controlled 20 percent of the world’s wealth. However, these corporations also appeared to own and control the stock in a majority of the world’s largest companies -- whose profits added up to an additional 60 percent of global revenues:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

Although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 [corporations] 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….

[This] core of 1318 companies [had] interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20 [other corporations].

A “SUPER-ENTITY” OF 147 CORPORATIONS CONTROL 40 PERCENT OF THE WEALTH

If that isn’t surprising enough for you, then how about this?

Glattfelder’s team then crunched the numbers even harder – and found a very deeply hidden “super-entity” of only 147 corporations – and “much of it” was connected to the 1,318-company ‘core’. These 147 companies were all interconnected with each other in an “even more tightly knit” pattern than the 1,318 corporations in the ‘core’. To put it simply, they all owned each other’s companies.

[Specifically, each company within the “super-entity” owned shares in all 146 others.]

Together, this super-elite, good-old-boys-club of 147 companies directly earns a whopping 40 percent of all the wealth in the world:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

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.

Without the advanced technology of supercomputers and chaos theory, no one would have been able to discover this. History has caught up to the Powers that Were.

THE SAME PEOPLE RUN THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Next question: What kind of companies do you think these top 147 corporations are? Remember – they control a staggering 40 percent of the world’s wealth.

As it says on page 6 of the paper, 75 percent of the corporations within the “super-entity” were financial institutions. The top 20 financial institutions within the “super-entity” should sound pretty familiar to you by now. They include Barclays Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch, UBS, Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.