MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
As anti-capitalist protesters take to the streets, mathematics has teased apart the global economic network to show who's really pulling the strings
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
Comments
There is something wrong with the "analysis" link in the post. If you give it as an address, I will read it with interest.
by moat on Sun, 10/23/2011 - 10:09pm
Hope this is the one you wanted. Note it is a pdf file.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf
by EmmaZahn on Sun, 10/23/2011 - 10:41pm
by artappraiser on Wed, 10/26/2011 - 1:49pm
Good to see the study being discussed. Thanks for the pointer.
If only I were more ambitious or even just more focused I might have finished a project I started around November 2008 that turns up many of the same names found at the top of this study's list. It is why I found the study creditble as well as more than a little incomplete. It barely covers the major role these institutions play as major owners and market makers in government debt around the world. They are the bond market that made the Clinton Administration Eisenhower Republicans and James Carville want to be reincarnated as. They are the money market.
My project was to identify the financial institutions who were (are) the primary dealers of the central banks of the world during 'the fall of 2008'* Before the fall of Lehman I did not even know the term but after reading the description and disclaimer on the NY Fed's website, I was entranced. At that time the Fed's Primary Dealers were its Open Market Committee's exclusive counterparties and they were beginning to fall like dominoes. From the Fed's perspective, the only way it had then of doing anything major was through them. It was like the it had painted itself into a corner. I think that largely explains why Bernanke had that deer-in-headlights look when he and Paulson were before Congress trying to arrange TARP. Also, one of the first thing Bernanke's Fed did after things started to settle down was to begin opening other channels and enlisting other counterparties.
I wish I had the resources and wherewithall to finish my project. Maybe next year.
*a pun borrowed from the NY Fed's Liberty Street blog.
by EmmaZahn on Thu, 10/27/2011 - 1:33pm
I do remember you saying around that time that you were smitten with a project and deep in learning mode...remember it because it was mysterious
by artappraiser on Thu, 10/27/2011 - 2:45pm