A study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has found that a mere 147 corporations control the world – orchestrating events and controlling governments.

The analysis, which looked at the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations, identified that only a tiny handful of mega-corporations, mostly banks, had a disproportionate amount of power over world events.

Newscientist.com reports: "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs [Trans-National Corporations] own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.