Capital Group, FMR Corp, State Street and Vanguard are among the top control-holders in the world, according to a recently released paper penned by a group of Swiss researchers.

In their paper, The Network of Global Control, the researchers named the most powerful firms on the global economic stage. The New York Times' Economix blog and The Washington Post's WonkBlog both reported on the paper.

"We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player," write Stefania Vitali, James Glattfeld and Stefano Battiston. "We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions."

Here are the top 20 control-holders:

1. Barclays PLC
2. Capital Group Companies (i.e. American Funds)
3. FMR Corp (i.e. Fidelity
4. Axa
5. State Street Corporation
6. JPMorgan Chase & Co.
7. Legal & General Group PLC
8. Vanguard Group
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.
11. Wellington Management Co.
12. Deutsche Bank (i.e. DWS)
13. Franklin Resources
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group
19. T. Rowe Price
20. Legg Mason

You can view the complete top 50 in table S1.  

Edited by: Armie Margaret Lee


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