147: The Magic Number
We love to prestige whore and argue about which bank is best, biggest and brightest. Still, it is pretty tough to gauge with ultimate accuracy who really holds the best hand at the table. Often nebulous factors like quality of life, work environment, implicit influence and transnational score are tough to gauge accurately.
These discussions and debates may soon, however, become moot, as three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have modeled a map of global economic power. They have weighed, measured and compared coming up with a list of 147 companies that rule the world. Not surprisingly, four big Wall Street names find themselves in the top ten, though I would be willing to bet that few if any of you could guess the four before reading the list.
Let's have an honor coded competition today and see who can guess best.
Jot down your top ten before clicking on the link and let me know how you did.
In perfect honesty I must admit that I only got two right.
Let the guessing begin...
BofA JPMorgan GS Citi Exxon Mobil General electric Samsung Apple General motors Toyota
my guesses:
Exxon Walmart Citi Apple GE JPMorgan BoA Microsoft Google Facebook
Google Exonn Shell BP Apple Goldman JP Morgan Deutsche Bank GE IBM
My guesses were: 1.Exxon 2. Walmart 3. General Electric 4. JP Morgan 5. Google 6. IBM 7. Subway :)) 8. Caterpillar 9. HSBC 10. China Petroleum
BUT as i realized the article really doesn't talk about the companies that ACTUALLY OWN (control) any assets, which makes this whole survey completely useless. All it tells me is how important the financial institutions are to our system.
Screw the occupiers!
News International.
For WS firms in the top 10,
I'd say JP Morgan, Citi, BofA, GS
the federal reserve the bank of england
I'm going with the oil giants. In no particular order:
Saudi Aramco Petro China BP Exxon
If you say there are four banks, I would go with the big balance sheet banks: BNP Paribas HSBC Holdings Deutsche Barclays
Can't imagine who the other 2 are in the top ten
Lol, ok way off. At least I got two.
this post is misleading, it leads on to think the article is about companies that have control of the world, ie oil companies, when its really about just who literally own equity.
Not even who owns the equity...it includes custodians....which move and hold trillions of dollars, but have no relation to ownership whatsoever.
It's a stupid survey meant to misguide people as if people weren't misguided enough already!!!
You guys are restricting your choices too much to financial services firms. You should probably consider IT/security providers (IBM, Cisco, Oracle and several in Japan), big pharmaceuticals (GSK, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi, etc.), News/Media (Walt Disney, Viacom, BskyB, etc.), Commodity/shipping (Glencore, Trafigura, etc.) and obviously some of the ones already mentioned in oil/gas, conglomerates (including Koch industries), and financial services.
lol
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