Deals and side deals and swindles very interesting as names are surfaced and details of transactions arise which are highly suspect and responsible people fall from windows. Then the clubs for the men across the planet that are so arranged as to satisfy all tastes.
A knot of energy can be seen in this Webb telescope view.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendancoffey/2011/10/26/the-four-companies-that-control-the-147-companies-that-own-everything/
The Four Companies That Control tthe 147 Companies That Own Everything
New Scientist featured a study done of networks by a Swiss University showed 4 Bank Holding companies controlled the key companies of Global wealth. Forbes a few years later said it was now 5 Bank Holding companies due to a split of one entity into two. Forbes comments on this in 2011. So of the $25.69 trillion in worldwide assets we've identified, $2.23 trillion are directly in indexes (ETFs and index mutual funds) with another $22.3 trillion indirectly beholden to indexes (that 95% of actively managed fund holdings said to be determined by an index). That means the real power to control the world lies with four companies: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor's, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay's, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world's money.
Very well let us move forward to now. The top 1% of households globally own 43% of all personal wealth while the bottom 50% have only 1%. The 1% are all millionaires in net wealth (after debt) and there are 52m of them. Within this 1%, there are 175,000 ultra-wealthy people with over $50m in net wealth – that’s a minuscule number of people (less than 0.1%) owning 25% of the world’s wealth!
This information comes from the 2020 Credit Suisse Global Wealth report which has just been released. We look back on it wistfully, wishing that there was a way to turn back time. The ravages of the coronavirus pandemic make most of us want to go back to 2019 and skip forward to 2021.
There’s more to miss 2019 for.
Turns out that despite political and trade conflicts, our collective wealth grew in the background at the fastest pace since 2005 last year.
This is just one of the surprising findings of the just-released
Allianz Global Wealth Report.
Worldwide, gross financial assets jumped 9.7 percent to a record 192 trillion euros in 2019 as the capital markets cheered the injection of funds by central banks into the system.
Central banks and governments may well be the saviors this year too. If the first half is any indication, their steps to protect people from the economic fallout of Covid-19 just might help private households hold on to their financial assets in 2020.
And now for the sobering news.
We didn’t really have to wait for the pandemic to wipe out the progress made in making the world more equal in terms of wealth distribution. 2019 widened the wealth gap between rich and poor countries again, increasing the difference in net financial assets per capita to 22 times from 19 times in 2016.
This is still well below the gap of 87 times that we had in 2000 but the trend reversal is disturbing indeed.