While the covid-19 pandemic has deeply affected our daily lives in many senses, it has definitely revealed some economic flaws that weren’t that well-noticed in our systems. Specifically, according to the Oxfam Media Briefing of 2020, some major global companies in the US not only didn’t experience any decreases in their revenue, but many of them also profited from the pandemic more than their previous years.
This phenomenon can potentially indicate a large number of issues or features of our current economic structure, in order to explore and analyze further, power mapping the relationship among these corporate titans is a useful approach to serve the purpose.
In this project, the company I decided to power map about is Google, as they made more than 20 percent profit margin in 2020.
Firstly, the graph shows the most important individuals and shareholders of Google. Vanguard Group is Google’s biggest shareholder with 7.21 percent of the stake, while BlackRock and Fidelity Management & Research have 4.32 and 4.15 percent.
With the data of Google’s major shareholders, The Vanguard Group as their largest shareholder caught my attention. After looking into the connections of Vanguard Group, I noticed that the top 3 stakeholders of them are Pfizer, AT&T, and Bank of America, which are also the top profiteers of this pandemic, this interesting discovery brought me to the examination of the monetary relationships between these companies and how the vanguard group serves as a medium in between.
Further exploration suggested that the Vanguard Group company as a huge fund management business, the shareholders of them are all huge international corporates.
Including Intel, Verizon, Coca-Cola, Cisco Systems, and other Global Companies, without exception, Vanguard Group is on every huge corporations’ major shareholders list. Through the connection of the Vanguard group, these massive firms seem to have a common interest in each other, which could potentially mean that these huge corporations will intentionally help each other to protect and promote their mutual profits.
In order to test this hypothesis regarding the Vanguard group’s impact on the global economic market, I searched for the companies which also have them as their biggest investor, the result was really surprising and it can imply a lot of things. The names of Apple, Microsoft, Visa, Facebook, and almost every other world-known corporation appeared on the list of those companies’ names, Such discovery can indicate that there is an inner circle existing in our economic system and the major players in the market are very limited and they have already formed a relationship or in some cases can be considered an alliance in order to support each other’s profit and monopolization.
In this case, it is reasonable to assume that due to the mutual interest that widely exists among Google, Vanguard group, and other corporate titans in the world’s business market, the members of this inner circle have the ability and need to take and use many measures and sources to stabilize or even boost their earnings during the pandemic, which eventually led them to become the profiteers of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Link to the power map: https://graphcommons.com/selections/6f47675d-72a9-4faa-8933-04b46b36d016
References
Oxfam Media Briefing., 2020. For communities already in crisis, a drop in remittances during COVID-19 can mean
life or death. Oxfam.