Courtesy of Citybizlist – According to theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Baltimore asset managers T. Rowe Price(Nasdaq:TROW) and Legg Mason (NYSE:LM) are part of a small network of companies – 147 to be exact – that wield “disproportionate power over the global economy.”
Three Swiss systems theorists examined the relationships of 43,060 transnational corporations extracted from a database of 37 million companies.
What they uncovered was the existence of a core of 1,318 companies that represented only 20 percent of the global operating revenues, but “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.”
The theorists drilled further and found that a “super-entity” of 147 companies – mostly financial institutions – controlled 40 percent of the total wealth in the network.
