62 people control more wealth than half world's population

[Sounder]

DnC wrote....

Add in the Queen's wealth of what some claim adds up to unimaginable proportions and it might read, one person owns more wealth than half the world's population combined.

I'd guess that about a dozen people own more wealth than half the worlds combined population and that the top one hundred own about 90% of all wealth.

But they are really nice to rent it out to the rest of us at really, really good rates.

[Freitag]

Like the Rothschilds (supposedly worth anywhere from $100 to $500 trillion) and Rockefellers (supposedly worth trillions), names we all know who manage to stay off the Forbes list?

So, why are these people excluded? I imagine because they are the real people pulling the strings and they demand absolute secrecy without any media attention at all.

It's because every generation dilutes the wealth. It's way harder to pass down a fortune successfully than to make it in the first place. The Vanderbilts are a classic example. Within a few decades of the death of "The Commodore", the Vanderbilt family name had fallen completely off of the list of wealthiest people.

[NeonLX]

{SIGH} Ya just gotta work harder, you damned plebes. Buncha lazy sods.

[brainpanhandler]

Like the Rothschilds (supposedly worth anywhere from $100 to $500 trillion) and Rockefellers (supposedly worth trillions), names we all know who manage to stay off the Forbes list?

So, why are these people excluded? I imagine because they are the real people pulling the strings and they demand absolute secrecy without any media attention at all.

It's because every generation dilutes the wealth. It's way harder to pass down a fortune successfully than to make it in the first place. The Vanderbilts are a classic example. Within a few decades of the death of "The Commodore", the Vanderbilt family name had fallen completely off of the list of wealthiest people.

It WAS way harder to pass down a fortune successfully than to make it in the first place.

The Rothschilds are supposedly worth hundreds of trillions? That's peanuts. I heard they were worth quadrillions.

[Freitag]

And dare I say it, Ennis Cosby as well.

That's an interesting angle, considering the allegations against his dad. From a quick web search the perp was caught and admitted the crime, but who knows. The killer was a young Russian kid. Maybe the elder Cosby raped someone with Russian mafia connections at some point.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Rockfellers and Rothschilds both made a fortune by building an infrastructure -- which then enabled others to make even bigger fortunes.

Rockefeller Family Tries to Keep A Vast Fortune From Dissipating
By RICHARD D. HYLTON
Published: February 16, 1992

The Rockefeller name is synonymous with the summits of wealth and philanthropic largesse. The family has founded museums, universities, philanthropic foundations, and some of the country's biggest national parks.

But, like so many Americans, the Rockefellers -- albeit on a grander scale -- are worried that their future generations may not be able to enjoy the life or influence the family now has. And so they have begun a vigorous effort to bolster their fortune, which they currently estimate at $5 billion to $10 billion.

For decades, the family quietly collected the interest on billions of dollars, and gave away hundreds of millions. What changed? Some family members pressed for access to the core of the fortune to increase their income. The climate for investment soured and produced lower yields. And most important, as the family grew, so did the number of people with claim to a piece of the fortune.

"Historically our goal has been the preservation of wealth rather than the amassing of wealth, but now that the client base is moving to 100 there is a new emphasis on growth," said David Rockefeller Jr., one of the many great-grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller, the family patriarch and America's first billionaire.

...

Currently, family members personally donate about $50 million a year to various causes, while foundations endowed by the family give away about $17o million each year. "The work here is to rebuild the per-capita wealth," David Rockefeller Jr. said. "But will we find another Standard Oil? Probably not."

Nine years later and even WSJ was eulogizing their power:

Do the Rockefellers Still Matter?
By Robert Frank

Exxon says the family holds only 0.006% of the company shares and shouldn’t get special treatment. (The family says it has larger holdings than that.) David Rockefeller is the only family member left on the Forbes list. With more than 150 living blood relatives of John D. Rockefeller Sr., many members of the latest generation of the family — known as the “fifth-sixth” generation — aren’t likely to be able to live off their dwindling family trusts, according to people close to the family.

Critics also point out that over the past 20 years, not a single Rockefeller has made a significant new fortune by starting a company. Last year, I interviewed a newly minted multi-millionaire in New York who told me he recently helped finance a small business project for a Rockefeller.

“Imagine that, I lent money to a Rockefeller,” he told me.

Until recently, it was almost inconceivable that I could even write the headline of this post. Today, it’s a legitimate question.

And overseas, circa 2012:

That’s why, for gilded dynasty watchers, the news of a union between these über-rich clans is so delicious: Lord Rothschild’s investment trust, RIT Capital Partners, is to buy a 37 per cent stake in Rockefeller Financial Services.

The numbers involved are pretty mind-boggling. RIT has £1.9 billion in net assets; the Rockefeller company has £22 billion. As if that wasn’t enough, these companies are just minor fragments of the two family empires. RIT was only founded in 1961; the principal family bank, NM Rothschild & Sons, was set up in 1811, and is run by Lord Rothschild’s cousin, David de Rothschild.

As for Rockefeller Financial Services, that was founded as early as 1882, when John D Rockefeller set up one of the first investment management businesses designed to run a single family’s money. So, as well as making a fortune from their principal company – Standard Oil – the Rockefellers have been making money from their money, as it were, for 130 years.

That is what makes these two dynasties so exceptional – not just their dizzying wealth, but the fact that they have held on to it for so long: and not just the loot, but also their family companies. Other banking dynasties have fallen by the wayside – SG Warburg, founded by Siegmund Warburg in 1946, was swallowed up by Swiss Bank Corporation in 1995; its asset management side, Mercury Asset Management, was taken over by Merrill Lynch in 1997.

...

It’s true that enormous fortunes – big enough to match 19th-century Rothschild and Rockefeller figures – have been made in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg is thought to be worth more than £12 billion since Facebook went public this month, though that figure seems to diminish a little with each Wall Street trading day. But, still, it’s unlikely that the name Zuckerberg will be associated with dynastic wealth for more than a century, as the Rothschild and Rockefeller names have been.

Part of the reason is that dotcom fortunes, like Zuckerberg’s, can be founded within the four walls of a tiny Harvard dormitory. Great banking and oil ventures needed vast manpower, and vast representation across the world, to establish a foothold in the Victorian rich lists. Those deep foundations produce a lasting infrastructure, a lasting familial obligation to the business, and that lasting association in the popular mind between a particular surname and great wealth .

...

The new union between the two clans does more than weld two vast fortunes to each other, then. It allies a pair of dynasties that have – coincidentally, independently – followed the two rules that all mega-plutocrats must obey if they want to be remembered in a century’s time. One: ensure your children feel a duty to preserve the family fortune. And, two, paradoxical as it may sound: give as much money as you can to universities, galleries and hospitals.

[Nordic]

And dare I say it, Ennis Cosby as well.

That's an interesting angle, considering the allegations against his dad. From a quick web search the perp was caught and admitted the crime, but who knows. The killer was a young Russian kid. Maybe the elder Cosby raped someone with Russian mafia connections at some point.

That's what I've been thinking lately. He raped some girl who told her Dad (or Dad found out). Dad was a rich and powerful and connected badass who returned the favor. It makes sense. Nothing else about the Ennis murder has ever made sense.

There are a lot of horrible people with tons of money in this city.

[NeonLX]

I never realized until recently that the "City of London Corporation" is real...or for that matter, had even heard of it. The financial center has its own police force and lobbies the hell out of the British government.

http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/201 ... ation-city

[DrEvil]

^^Yeah, that's what people usually mean when they refer to the City, or the City of London, as opposed to the lowercase city of London. It's a messed up little place, practically running itself. Businesses with offices are allowed to vote in local elections for instance. Number of votes depend on number of employees.
It's a corporatist haven and a pretty good picture of what large corporations would like the world to be like.

Wikipedia has an extensive overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

[Wombaticus Rex]

Interestingly, just tonight I stumbled across one of those "astronomical wealth" claims about a Rothschild clan: apparently now they're worth "500 TRILLION DOLLARS."

Among other things, that is 125x the total world currency circulation in 2012, and a little over 6x world GDP in 2014 (77t USD), so assuming that a near majority of all shareholders of all banks and all corporations traded on all exchanges are secretly Rothschild proxy accounts -- and always have been, for three centuries running -- that sum becomes sort of vaguely reasonable.

A total kayfabe market is hardly a stretch. Yet what we're talking about would also be a secret parallel economy that's bigger than finance, drugs, and real estate combined, so perhaps "vaguely reasonable" is too generous.

The NYSE is capped at just over $16t, the LSE at $4t, Tokyo at just under $4t, and most estimates I've seen put NASDAQ at $4t, too. It's all downhill from there, in terms of valuation. The total US real estate holdings are generally estimated at $25t.

Remember this classic?



Of course, the "total notational value" of the derivatives market is an incoherent concept: you're basically saying every single bet in Las Vegas will pay off. If you understand how options get written, you can recognize that as gibberish, and I'm not going into it here beyond saying it's the same as having every NFL team win the Superbowl in 2016. If that makes sense, you're a Zero Hedge regular.