[Wally_Kalbacken]

But of course if the mutual funds represent hundreds of thousands of indivudual fund owners, and if the corporations themselves have hundereds of thousands of owners of their shares...

[mad_as_he$$]

DUH! Anyone who follows the market should have figured this out the first week.

[proxy_user]

Our system is so large, everyone is scratching his head trying to figure out what is going on.

Suppose, for example, that we discovered CitiCorp controls vast stretches of the economy. OK, they have 300,000 employees at that place. So who exactly is in charge? It doesn’t seem like the officially designated top management has a clue about half of what goes on there. The stockholders? They know nothing.

[demkicker]

"[With] new company structures which are so big and spanning the globe, it's hard to see what they're up to and what they're doing,” he said. Large, sparse networks dominated by a few major companies could also be more vulnerable, he said.

I definitely smell George Soros.

[Desdemona]

In a word: DUH.

[SunkenCiv]

Companies from US, UK and Australia have the most concentrated financial power.

The key to keeping a tailored suit looking nice is to not sleep in it.

[Arguendo]

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007.

Part of the blame for the recent bubble goes to physicists. Banks would hire physicists who knew nothing about the market, these guys would create complicated "risk" models no one else understood but that predicted a "1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000" chance of the crash we saw or whatever, and traders would rely on the models and take ever-increasing risk since they were created by "scientists."

I have way more respect for physics as a real science than I have for finance, but that doesn't mean physicists know anything about finance.