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Danger Ahead: The Oligarchs Don’t Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money
Now put the Monopoly game board away and consider this: Researchers in Zurich, Switzerland have found that there are roughly 43,000 transnational corporations that dominate the global economy. Of those, there are about 1,300 companies that control 80% of all the global revenues for all the transnational corporations on the planet. Now let’s take it a step further. Of those 1,300 core companies, only 147 companies, which all happen to own each other in some way, control 40% – or nearly half – of all the wealth in the entire transnational corporate network. That means 1% of transnationals own 40% of all the world’s business wealth.
In other words, the global 1% has its own 1%.
This is similar to a Monopoly situation in which just one player owns 40% of the board. And just like it’s game over for Monopoly, it’s game over for the global economy, too.
Right now, you can count the number of banks that own half of all the wealth in the U.S. economy on just one hand. There are just five of them and they are the usual suspects: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Their total assets equal 8.5 trillion, which is 56% of our entire economy.
In 2007 we all learned the consequences of disproportionate wealth and power concentrated in the hands of just a few companies. When one company begins to fail, they all begin to fail. And when they all fail, well, that’s what collapse looks like.
That why policymakers labeled the banks “Too Big to Fail” and bailed them out to prevent total collapse. Today, these banks are even bigger. And thanks to globalization, their tentacles are wrapped around the entire world’s economy. It won’t just be the United States imploding the next time these giants fall: it will be much of planet Earth itself.
This is the danger of raw, unfettered capitalism…
Full article: Danger Ahead: The Oligarchs Don't Understand That Economic Collapse Happens When They Get All the Money | Alternet.
2012-11-13 20:41:00
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