Oil giants and banks – what they depend on

"Three of the four largest shareholding companies in the world are oil companies – Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath the oil giants are ten banks – JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BOA Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital, UBS, and Wells Fargo Securities – that control nearly 60 percent of the worlwide investment banking market. [...] beneath the financial investors are 500 globally traded companies – with combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is equal to one-third of the world's $62 trillion GDP – that are inextricably connected to and dependent on fossil fuel energy, global telecommunications, and the world's electricity grid for their very existence. In no other period of history have so few institutions wielded so much economic power over the lives of so many people. [...] This unprecedented – and unimaginable – concentration of economic power was not just happenstance or a byproduct of man's insatiable avarice. [...] on a more fundamental level, it flowed inexorably from the communication / energy / transportation matrices that were the foundation of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 66, 67]