And yet - who really controls the world?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the article "Who is the World Puppeteer?" I made a connection between the occult practice of Western elites and their policies aimed at the destruction of the civilian population of different countries. This connection is carried out at the level of religious knowledge, due to which it does not give a specific answer to the question posed.

Here the question of "puppeteers" will be considered in a down-to-earth manner. This will be based on the following thesis: the largest independent holders of financial assets have the greatest real power … Then the question of world control comes down to who these holders are. With today's level of access to information and the ability to add two plus two, this is not a secret behind seven seals. Let's get started.

When we hear about dollar billionaires, we usually imagine famous figures: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Warren Buffett. There are other characters that are not often mentioned in the media, but are regularly featured on Forbes' annual list of billionaires. Basically, billionaires are the heads of industrial giants, IT empires, telecommunications operators, media, real estate agencies, retail chains. Their company consists of manufacturers of food products, cosmetics, medicines, clothing, household appliances, software, etc. Organizations headed by billionaires, as a rule, operate on a global scale, so they are called "transnational corporations" or, for short, TNCs. Through a persistent myth shaped by Western propaganda, billionaires are portrayed as the embodiment of the "American Dream." That is, while some Americans sat on their poles evenly, other Americans, thanks to their enterprise, hard work and perseverance, earned first millions, and then billions. Everyone can become the head of TNK, if there is a desire, yeah. So, thanks to this myth, people have an idea that the heads of TNCs, having large capital, can dictate their interests as independent financial players. This idea, as will be seen later in the article, has little to do with reality.

A little closer to reality is the version according to which control over the world is exercised by American banks and the Fed. In particular, the myth is widespread among the people that the Fed can at any time print as many dollars as is needed for the current needs of the American economy. This myth was reasonably analyzed by blogger Oleg Makarenko in the article “Why you can't print dollars forever”. In short, the “seal” scheme looks like this: the Federal Reserve prints dollars and buys issued government bonds from the Treasury with them, after which the Treasury sends dollars to the federal budget to support the US economy. At the same time, the value of bonds rises, and the interest on them falls. This damages domestic bond buyers (pension funds, social assistance funds and insurance companies), who have to keep in their portfolios "junk" that does not bring them sufficient returns. Therefore, the more dollars are “printed”, the greater the threat it poses to the social sphere of the United States. It is important for us to extract the following here - the Fed's activities are limited to certain conditions that cannot be violated in order to preserve the United States as a state … American banks, of course, also operate in the legal field, and they are subject to all the requirements of the relevant laws, the observance of which is monitored by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). Therefore, to ascribe superpower to the organs that ensure the functioning of the real economy of the American state is, to put it mildly, an exaggeration.

The question is, where is the catch?

The answer to this question will be given by mathematics, namely, graph theory. On July 28, 2011, arXiv.org posted a study by a group of experts from the Chair of Systems Design, a data-driven modeling center called “The Network of Global Corporate Control”. Scientists began their analysis with a list of 43,060 TNCs, selected from a 30-million-strong array of economic entities, and using the recursive search method came to a much larger supersystem, consisting of 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 links reaching out to owners. Their conclusion is quite interesting:

We have seen that TNCs form a giant loop-like structure, and that much of the control is exercised by the tightly knit core of financial institutions. It seems that this core is an economic "superorganization", and this raises a new layer of important problems for researchers and political actors.

Anyone who understands graph theory can download this work and evaluate the correctness of its methodology and conclusions. Judging by the fact that it has been published in a number of publications, it has successfully passed the peer review. Therefore, there is no reason to doubt that the work was done honestly, impartially and professionally. Let's look at the top ten of these largest financial institutions discovered by scientists (as of 2017, the picture is slightly different, but this does not change the essence):

1 BARCLAYS PLC(Great Britain)

2 CAPITAL GROUP COMPANIES INC, THE(USA)

3 FMR CORP(USA)

4 AXA(France)

5 STATE STREET CORPORATION (USA)

6 JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. (USA)

7 LEGAL & GENERAL GROUP PLC (Great Britain)

8 VANGUARD GROUP, INC., THE (USA)

9 UBS AG (Switzerland)

10 MERRILL LYNCH & CO., INC. (USA)

Readers of Tatyana Volkova's blog have already recognized the familiar name - The Vanguard Group (hereinafter referred to as Vanguard for short). However, with all due respect to her quest, she believes that the network of such institutions somehow closes in on Vanguard, ignoring the complex nature of this network. Outwardly, these companies look like ordinary financial centers. They are legally registered, have their own websites and post information about their top management on them. Some serious people in business suits are engaged in some kind of monetary transactions - who might be interested in this? Unsurprisingly, of all the conspiracy theorists' candidates for global power, investment funds and trillion-dollar asset managers ranked last. Colossal money loves silence and non-publicity. Least of all, these mega-tycoons need public awareness of their activities, and they do everything so as not to attract undue attention to themselves and not to raise doubts about their impeccable business reputation. It is natural to assume that they spend a lot of money and attract first-class specialists to maintain their legal purity, which means that they cannot be undermined from any side. A giant network structure, as well as close interconnections, coupled with an unimaginable shadow influence on the world economy and politics, make this financial octopus invulnerable to any external influences.

How do you like the picture? With numbers, it will become even more impressive.

The impact of asset managers in numbers

As stated above, TNCs are definitely not independent economic players. If we imagine a network of TNCs (for example, as here), then hierarchically above it is the network actual owners of TNCsone of which is Vanguard.

Although the management of a company's shares does not necessarily mean ownership of those shares, it is the difference between the quantity, value and quality of shares held by nominees and shares held by investment companies that determines whose interests will be prioritized. And this difference is far from in favor of nominal owners - moreover, it is several times, orders of magnitude greater. It should also be understood that the management of valuable assets implies daily concrete actions with these assets, while for nominal owners they can often “lie like a dead weight”. So in this situation, the owner is the one who actually manages the financial resources.

To illustrate, I will give a few links from the German-language service Yahoo Finance, so that you can understand the scale.

(as of the date of this writing)

Microsoft Corporation - Bill Gates owns 190,992,934 Microsoft shares. We go down below and see: Vanguard itself alone owns 525 395 707 Microsoft shares in the amount of 32 648 088 707 dollars. Going down even further, we see that three more Vanguard funds hold 346,477,637 shares for a total of almost $ 20 billion. Not bad? Add to this the fact that such investment companies are intertwined with each other, as a result of which the structure of their holdings diversifies into complete non-traceability. Take another institutional owner of Microsoft, State Street Corporation, and put that name in a search. Surprise - Vanguard # 3 as Institutional Owner of the State Street Corporation! By the way, this is why Volkova concluded that Vanguard controls everything and everyone, regardless of the network structure in which such companies are located. At the same time, it should be admitted that the data on the owners of Vanguard and its funds nowhere not disclosed, even taking into account the strict requirements of German law. Here are a few more examples related to Vanguard, although we should not forget about other such major institutions. Just see the difference between direct and institutional owners.

The most famous TNCs:

Coca-Cola, McDonald's Corporation, Procter & Gamble, Nike Inc., Facebook

The largest media conglomerates that control the vast majority of American media:

Time Warner Inc., The Walt Disney Company, Sony Corporation, Comcast, News Corporation

Major electronics manufacturers:

General Electric, IBM Corporation, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Siemens AG

Major oil companies:

Royal Dutch Shell PLC, BP PLC, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Chevron Corporation

Major transport manufacturers:

General Motors, The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation

Major pharmaceutical companies:

Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Pfizer

And the cherry on top is the largest cans:

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corporation, Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Company, Goldman Sachs

Institutional owners often account for more than half of the world's largest companies. This share can reach 80% and even higher. Of course, precise data on the quality of these stocks is not available, which reinforces the “these companies are only financial services” thesis. One simple question gets in the way of agreeing with him:

Why do multinational corporations and banks need a “gasket” in the form of these financial monsters? Do these companies have no competent staff to manage all of their assets?