have transnational corporations being acting anti-competitively as a bloc?

so how many of these corporations do you recognise?


i ask because its possible that due to their close ownership ties they have been operating as a bloc


and we wouldn't know it because till now nobody knew the extent of their cross ownership


i came across this info on g+ in a post by john baez on a paper called "the network of global control" that alexander kruel had pointed out to him. 


you can get the paper here from cornell university library.


the paper (submitted 28/7/11) is by stefania vitali, james b. glattfelder and stefano battiston and it starts to perform the task of uncovering for the 1st time the worldwide structure of corporate control of transnational corporations.

my mega summary of some of the astonishing things it appears to start to prove (previously some of us suspected but .....) follows:

1)  nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of transnational corporations in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 transnational corporations in the core; 

2) about 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms

of the core itself - cumulatively they hold the majority share of each other and so the core has almost full control over itself;

3) almost 3/4 of the core is made up of financial intermediaries;

4) recent works and experience show that when a financial network is very densely connected it is prone to systemic risk;

5) this connection by ownership could facilitate the formation of blocs hampering market competition;

6) at a national level even small cross-shareholding patterns can affect market competition - but at a global level this has never been documented - and antitrust institutions monitor at a national - not global level