"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]
Showing posts with label The First Industrial Revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The First Industrial Revolution. Show all posts
Oil giants and banks – what they depend on
The First Industrial Revolution – STEAM – Second half of 19th century
The convergence of coal-powered steam printing and coal-powered steam rail transport created an infrastructure for the First Industrial Revolution. The communications part of the infrastructure was augmented with the build-out of a nationwide telegraph network in the 1860's, allowing businesses instantaneous communication across their supply chains and distribution channels.
The coming together of steam-powered printing, the telegraph, and the steam-powered locomotive dramatically increased the speed and dependability with which economic resources could be marshaled, transported, processed, transformed into products, and distributed to customers.
[...] The vertically integrated business enterprise took off in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and became the dominant business model during the whole of the twentieth century.
[...] Virtually all the entrepreneurs who prospered during the takeoff stage of the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century succeeded in large part because they were able to raise sufficient financial capital by incorporating and becoming a publicly traded shareholding company. The capital allowed them to capture vertically scaled market opportunities and become the standard bearers of their respective industries.
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 55, 56, 57]
