On June 28th, PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers) came out with their listing of “Global Top 100 companies (2018): Ranking of the top 100 global companies by market capitalisation”, and reported:
“The increase in China’s market capitalisation has been close to that of the US this year. … China’s contribution to the top 100 market capitalisation increased by 57%, to $2,822bn. … European companies have never fully recovered from the 2009 financial crisis. Europe is now represented by just 23 companies (down from 31 in 2009) and accounts for only 17% of the top 100 market capitalisation (compared to 27% in 2009).”
How much more can Europe’s wealth shrink?
Europe is shrinking as an international place to invest, even while it is exploding as an international place to receive refugees from the nations where the U.S. regime bomb and destroy the infrastructure, and leave hell for the residents, who thus flee, mainly to nearby Europe, and so cause the refugee-crisis there. Usually, the U.S. isn’t the only invader: it solicits any allies it can muster — mainly fundamentalist-Sunni Arab regimes, plus the apartheid theocracy of Israel, but also a few regimes in Europe — to join in this creation of hell for the escapees, and of immigrants to Europe. But, as Barack Obama put it,
“The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”
The U.S. aristocracy intend to keep things that way, and their allies just tag along.
The U.S. regime is solidly neoconservative, or imperialistic; and the way that it grows its wealth and its power now is at Europe’s expense. The data show this.
During recent centuries, Europe had led the world, but now the U.S. does, and at Europe’s expense, but especially at the expense of the people who live where we bomb. This is just a fact, but what are Europeans doing about it? Thus far, nothing. Is that about to change? Maybe things are finally getting bad enough.
On page 31 of the PwC report, is shown that whereas in 2009 the U.S. had 42% of the “Top 100” companies, that figure in 2018 is 54% — 54 firms, instead of the previous 42.
China has 12 instead of the former 9.
But most of Europe has seen declines, instead of rises.
UK now has 5 instead of the former 9.
France now has 4 instead of the former 7.
Germany now has 4 instead of the former 5.
Russia has been hit particularly hard by U.S. sanctions; it now has 0, instead of the former 2.
Three European countries had 1 in 2009 and now have 0 — none at all — and these three are: Italy, Norway, Finland.
No one can reasonably deny, in light of these data, that the U.S. aristocracy — the individuals who control America’s international corporations and U.S. Government and America’s ‘news’ media (to control the public) — have continued to win against Europe’s aristocracies (the U.S. counterparts in the European subcontinent).
What’s amazing is that Europe’s aristocrats are not fighting back — except (some of them) against the refugees from America’s invasions and coups (and opposing those refugees isn’t dealing with the source of Europe’s economic problem). Even if the publics in Europe are powerless, the billionaires who still remain there are not. How much longer will they continue to be sitting ducks for America’s billionaires to target and eat?
Europe’s power in the world could shrink to almost nothing, unless foreign affairs in Europe soon reverse 180 degrees, and turn against the U.S. and its allies, instead of stay with those regime-change fanatics — and against themselves.
Europe is not declining on account of some failure by Europeans, except a failure to fight back in an intelligent way, which means, above all: against the real source of Europe’s decline. America, after all, definitely is not a democracy.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
