Under advanced capitalism, Phillips rightly observed, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralised capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.
He laments that a few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite of the world, dominate nation-states through international trade agreements and transnational state organisations such as the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund. In his analysis Prof Phillips posited that TCC communicates their policy requirements through global networks such as the G-7 and G-20, and various nongovernmental policy organisations such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group. The TCC represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.
