Debt Rattle October 22 2026

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Michael Reid

For me AI is just another voice to consider

Me too. I’m learning how to ask questions.

[Michael Reid]

an exploration of how to evaluate the companies that own most of the stock, and how the owners can hide their identities. New info.

The Super-Entity That Owns the World
An analysis by Eric Buesing
Michel Chossudovsky
Oct 22

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[This article by Eric Buesing was first published by Global Research. You can read it here.]

A peer-reviewed network study showed a tightly interlocked “super-entity” of financial institutions controls 40% of all transnational corporate wealth

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In 2007, a tightly linked group of 147 firms, mostly financial, held nearly 40 percent of the control over the economic value of the world’s transnational corporations.1 The United States has stopped asking domestic companies to name their owners.2 Together, concentrated control and hidden ownership put power where voters can’t see it or check it.

In October 2011, three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich published “The Network of Global Corporate Control.”3 Its authors called it the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network.4 Most people have never heard of it.

The Map
Stefania Vitali and her coauthors James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston set out to put numbers on a suspicion many people already held: that a handful of corporations dominates the global economy.5 They started with Orbis 2007, a commercial database of about 37 million companies and investors. From it they pulled 43,060 transnational corporations in 116 countries, which are companies that operate in more than one country. Then they traced the ownership chains running into and out of those companies. The result was a network of about 600,000 entities joined by just over one million ownership ties.6

Ownership runs in loops. Say Company A owns shares in Company B, and Company B owns shares back in Company A. Control flows up through links like that, and some shareholders end up very powerful.7 The researchers built a new method so the loops wouldn’t inflate the totals.8

Who Holds the Control
The network formed a giant bow tie. At its center sat a very small, very dense core of 1,318 companies out of 43,060.9 Each core member was tied to about 20 others, and about three quarters of the ownership of core firms stayed with other core firms.10

Inside that core sat 147 firms the authors called an economic super entity. They held nearly 40 percent of the control over the economic value of all the transnational corporations in the study, measured by operating revenue, which is the money a company earns from its business. They also had almost full control over themselves.11 That’s 147 companies out of more than 43,000. In Glattfelder’s words, less than 1 percent of the companies controlled 40 percent of the network.12 The concentration held under all three models the authors used to estimate control.13

The 2007 top ten ran Barclays, Capital Group, FMR, AXA, State Street, JPMorgan Chase, Legal & General, Vanguard, UBS and Merrill Lynch. Goldman Sachs ranked 18th and Morgan Stanley 21st. The top 50 spanned ten countries.14

That list has been rearranged since, mostly by mergers. BlackRock isn’t on it by name because it didn’t own Barclays Global Investors until it bought that Barclays unit in December 2009.15 Lehman Brothers, ranked 34th, collapsed in September 2008.16 Bank of America, ranked 25th, bought Merrill Lynch, ranked tenth, on January 1, 2009.17 UBS, ranked ninth, took over Credit Suisse, ranked 14th, in June 2023.18 Franklin Resources, ranked 13th, bought Legg Mason, ranked 20th, in July 2020.19 On October 1, 2026, Nuveen, which TIAA owns, completed its purchase of Schroders. TIAA ranked 29th and Schroders 32nd.20 Four of those deals folded one top 50 firm into another.

Three quarters of the core were financial firms.21 Banks and investment firms move the world’s capital. They decide who gets loans and which industries get investment, so some thrive and others starve. Whoever controls that flow controls more than their shareholdings suggest. The authors wrote that the top holders are in a position to exert considerable control, through votes at shareholder and board meetings or through informal negotiation.22

Why Concentration Matters
Tight links make a network fragile. The authors warned that a network this dense looks sturdy in good times and pulls many firms into distress together in bad times, and they said the recent financial turmoil showed that pattern.23 In September 2008 the failure of Lehman Brothers and the looming collapse of AIG forced the government to choose between risking the collapse of the financial system and a taxpayer rescue.24

Competition suffers too. Many firms in the core have overlapping lines of business, and ownership ties among them open a path to blocs that hurt competition.25 When the same institutions hold large stakes in supposed rivals, what does competition mean?

The concentration didn’t stop in 2007. By 2019 the three biggest index fund managers, which run funds that track the stock market, cast about 25 percent of the votes at S&P 500 companies on average, and two scholars projected a path to as much as 40 percent within two decades.26 State Street and Vanguard were already in the ETH top ten. BlackRock got there by buying Barclays Global Investors.

From the Boardroom to Washington
Now follow the power into politics. In 2014, Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern published “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” which tested four theories of American politics against data on 1,779 policy issues from 1981 to 2002. They found that economic elites and business oriented interest groups have substantial independent influence on policy, while average citizens and mass based interest groups have little or no independent influence.27 Proposals with high elite support passed about 45 percent of the time, and proposals with low elite support passed about 18 percent of the time. Policy changed about 30 percent of the time whether a minority or a majority of citizens supported it.28 The authors concluded that if business interests and a small number of affluent Americans dominate policymaking, the country’s claim to democratic governance is badly undermined.29

The first study shows how concentrated control is inside corporations. The second shows who wins when policy gets decided. When a few institutions hold that much control, and business groups outweigh ordinary citizens in Washington, power sits where voters can’t reach it.

Who Owns the Owners
Vanguard ranked eighth in 2007. By 2017 it held stakes of 5 percent or more in essentially all of the S&P 500, up from fifteen companies in 2007, and the three biggest index fund managers generally vote all of their shares.30 So who owns Vanguard? Vanguard says The Vanguard Group, Inc. is owned by its US funds and ETFs, and those funds are owned by their investors.31 The answer runs in a circle and ends at no named owner. A firm with a stake in nearly every major American company has nobody above it you can point to.

Vanguard isn’t the only one. Capital Group, ranked second, calls itself privately owned.32 Fidelity, whose parent FMR ranked third, says it has been privately held since 1946.33 That makes three of the top eight owners firms whose shares the public can’t buy. A public company has to name its large shareholders in SEC filings. These firms aren’t public companies. A map can show everything they own. Above them, it shows very little.

The Owners Nobody Has to Name
You can’t check power you can’t see. The ETH team built its map from the ownership records available to it, and ownership that nobody records can’t appear on any map. American law has made that easier to arrange.

In 2012, the study “Global Shell Games” had researchers posing as customers send more than 7,400 emails to more than 3,700 corporate service providers in 182 countries specifically asking them to set up anonymous shell companies.34 The United States was among the worst offenders, and Delaware, Nevada, Montana and Wyoming were among the easiest places in the world to set one up. Researchers closed a US deal in under three hours after about a dozen approaches, and the same job in tax havens took more than twice the time and effort.35

The Corporate Transparency Act required companies to report their real owners to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.36 Treasury suspended enforcement against domestic companies in March 2025, and the network then removed the reporting requirement for them.37 It announced a final rule on August 11, 2026, effective August 14, that locked in the change. Now only certain foreign entities registered to do business in the United States report, and they report only owners who aren’t US persons.38 A May 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office warned that the domestic exemption leaves gaps in ownership information and raises the risk of illicit finance.39A US company can now keep its real owners off the federal record, and the law allows it.

The Study That Vanished
When the paper came out in October 2011, New Scientist ran a feature as Occupy protests spread.40 Then public attention faded. The first study to put numbers on the concentration of global corporate control became a footnote.41Since then, policy has moved toward less ownership disclosure, not more.

Network topology doesn’t fit neatly into a news segment. The finding also cuts against the story we tell ourselves about free markets and fair competition.

When Charters Ran Out
Corporations didn’t always work this way. In early America a legislature had to pass a law to create one, and the charter spelled out what the company could do.42 Early charters named a public purpose, and most weren’t perpetual.43 They ran for a set number of years, and renewal gave the legislature a chance to check how the company had behaved.44 In 1785 Pennsylvania revoked the charter of the Bank of North America.45

General incorporation laws ended that. New York passed the first in 1811, and by 1875 more than 90 percent of states offered one.46 State oversight of how corporations were created and monitored shrank.47 The trust came next. In 1882 the stock of about forty corporations went to nine trustees who issued certificates in return, which put the whole combination under one control.48 Congress answered with the Sherman Act in 1890, which declared illegal any “combination in the form of trust or otherwise” in restraint of trade.49 In 1899 the same control moved into a holding corporation in New Jersey, and the Supreme Court ruled against it in 1911.50

The old rule fits the problem the ETH map shows. A corporation’s charter that ends on a set date, with renewal only after a public showing of benefit, would give voters a way to review firms that no shareholder vote can reach. We should bring it back for the largest corporations. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, reintroduced in December 2024, would require corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to hold a federal charter.51 A charter that expires would go further.

A Republic Has to See
A republic rests on one rule: the people can see who holds the power. That’s why we make our laws in public and try our cases in open court. Yet faceless entities are taking over the economy one merger and one acquisition at a time, and the law lets them stay unseen. Nobody voted for it. Nobody was asked. Each deal leaves fewer hands on the controls, and the owners behind those hands get harder to find. Choice is the first freedom to go. When the same few names sit behind rival firms, a worker or a customer has nowhere else to turn, and the decisions that shape a life get made in rooms no citizen can enter. Bring back charters that end on a set date. Make every large owner put its real owners on the public record. Our children will inherit whatever we allow now, and a country can’t govern what it isn’t allowed to see. The map exists. Now the owners behind it have to step into view.

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Eric Daniel Buesing is an independent researcher and the author of The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations(TrineDay, 2026) and The Illusion Architects: How Elites Shape Culture, Consciousness, and Reality (TrineDay, 2027). For 22 years he has studied elite power structures, mapping the architectures of influence that govern societies, economies, and global institutions, work that builds on the foundations laid by Carroll Quigley and Antony Sutton. A former licensed private investigator and expert witness with an MBA and specialized expertise in voice stress analysis, he brings an investigator’s discipline to the historical record. His work challenges mainstream narratives and invites readers to look more closely at the systems that shape their world.

[WES]

Brian Berlitic Article Above;

Basically, the short version, it is so hopeless for the US, that they should just give up, and leave everything in the capable hands of the City of London/Globalists!

[Author]

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