Some of the crimes of capitalism – share market greed and enrichment

At a time of rising energy bills, deepening inequality and growing global instability, questions are being asked about who really controls the world’s wealth. From asset management giants to privatised power companies, critics argue that shareholder profit is increasingly prioritised over public wellbeing. This article explores the financial structures behind that power.

Late last year I was asked to do a talk at a rally for Palestine on the crimes of capitalism with a particular focus on the share market as the stock exchange building was just down the road and we could be protesting outside the building. This article is based on that talk.

The Rise of Global Asset Management Power

Today, we are witnessing a global merger of the military, industrial, and financial elites in an extremely monopolistic manner.

According to Peter Phillips, the author of the recently published “Titans of Capital” in an interview with Truthout on August 26, 2025, by Peter Handel:

“The top 10 asset management firms now control $50 trillion of global wealth. They answer to no one but the ultra-rich — the 0.05 percent — whose fortunes they continue to expand. The rest of us pay the price. Investing in everything from fossil fuel companies to private prisons to weapons manufacturers, they provide the economic lifeblood for some of the most destructive forces in the world. This not only undermines democracy, but imperils our very survival.”

Phillips says that the number of trillion-dollar and multi-trillion-dollar capital investment management companies numbered 31 in 2022, “now collectively managing over $83 trillion. These firms hold the core of global capital wealth, with the top 10 managing $50 trillion in combined assets and now threatening everything from democracy to the environment to personal health.

“The Titans are the individuals who serve on the boards of directors of the 10 largest capital management companies in the world as of 2022: BlackRock, Vanguard Group, UBS Group, Fidelity Investments, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Amundi, Allianz/PIMCO and Capital Group.

“The Titans hold the centre of global capital in their hands. Governments, military, intelligence agencies, policy groups, corporate media, and other capitalists consider the Titans’ concentrated wealth to be a special interest that requires constant sociopolitical protection and support.”

Wars such as the current conflict in Gaza rely on deep financial backing from global capital networks.

What Privatisation Did to New Zealand’s Power Companies

Power companies privatisation

I want to use the example of power companies in New Zealand which were privatised in 2013, to illustrate the use of the share market to enrich their owners with dividends through uncontrolled price increases and a collapse in investment.

This has reached the point where families can’t pay their bills and entire industries have been destroyed, with thousands of jobs gone, because they were big energy users.

Here I am summarising a useful booklet by the Council of Trade Unions called “Publicly Owned Electricity”.

By law, the power companies must maximise their profits for their shareholders. But the extent of their self-enrichment has driven the power companies’ real value down through their failure to invest in the future.

They have also blocked an energy transition away from reliance on the more expensive coal. This is because their pricing structure is based on the most expensive source of electricity which is always the Huntly coal power station whose projected life has been extended another decade. The companies are actively blocking cheaper new power sources like wind and solar and preventing a green energy transition. To me, this borders on the criminal.

In the last decade, that has meant zero investment in new production. That is correct! ZERO. As a result, electricity production per capita is down 13% because of the increased population. But demand hasn’t declined. As a consequence, the power companies have been able to lift prices 30% in real terms. Household power prices per quarter in Auckland are on average over $600 – nearly twice the price in Australia. In KeriKeri its over $800. Cases of energy hardship and poverty are exploding.

After privatisation, dividends to the shareholders have surged upwards. $13.7 billion has been paid out since 2013 when they were privatised – double the pre-privatisation average per year.

New investment also collapsed after 2013. Dividends were usually twice what was being invested. For seven years, dividends were greater than total profits!

“From 2014 to 2021, these firms have collectively paid out $3.7 billion more in dividends to their shareholders than they have earned in profits – an average excess dividend of $459 million a year,” said FIRST Union Researcher and Policy Analyst Edward Miller.

ACC has $50b invested and the Superfund $80b. About 85% of the Superfunds investments are foreign – property, shares or bonds – including Israeli government bonds.

The Palestine Solidarity Network is taking the Superfund to court for its refusal to divest from Israel.

The share market is where the wealthy trade among themselves. In the US the top 10% own 90% of shares. There is no reason to think it’s different here. Its current value is $226 billion. About 40% is foreign-owned.

Maximising dividend payouts is their purpose in life. This is by dividends but increasingly they buy back shares to enrich themselves further. This used to be unlawful in the US and New Zealand until the ”neoliberal” reforms freed up markets to the maximum extent possible to enable greater enrichment at the top. Nearly all the big US companies are doing it. Half of S&P 500 companies’ profits are returned that way.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been returned that way in New Zealand rather than being reinvested in the company. It has been done at Air NZ, SkyCity, Fletchers, and Spark E, for example.

I assume because they were half state-owned the power companies had a different approach. Power companies have deliberately refused to invest in new renewable technologies to maintain high prices and used the profit gouging to reward their shareholders in a similar way.

Is the US Share Market Heading for a Tech Bubble Collapse?

Bubble, bubble

But we now have a bubble in the US sharemarket that is going to burst and wipe out trillions of dollars in wealth.

The bubble is also connected to a Tech company bubble where they are keeping investment going by using private debt markets that they can hide from view, as well as buying into each other in a cannibalistic form that is going to end badly. (See image below for the biggest value tech company Nvidia.)

The boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, admits it’s a bubble. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos also says it’s a bubble, but a “good bubble”. This is nonsense, of course.

All the big techs companies are enablers of this war and war in Gaza. They are all intimately tied into the Pentagon, CIA and Mossad.

The grotesque form of late capitalism is reflected in the person of the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison – the biggest private funder of the genocidal Israeli Defence Forces.

His company is part of a web of companies promoting Open AI as the future of humanity. But 95% of users of Open AI are not making any money from his services and very few actually pay for the App he owns ChatGPT.

All these tech titans are deeply elitist, racist, anti-democratic and imperialistic in their world view.

They repeatedly prioritise profit over human life. This week is the anniversary of the Pike River mine disaster in New Zealand, where no one was prosecuted for 29 dead and families are still demanding accountability.

This week also saw the US courts announce that no one will be prosecuted for the deaths of 346 people in two crashes of Boeing planes that were the direct result of profit and dividend payout maximising over investing in engineering safety.

What Happens When the Financial Bubble Bursts?

When the bubble bursts in the USA, the tech companies will demand bailouts because they are “too big to fail”. This should be refused, of course,

But the risk is that the levels of debt, both private debt and banking debt, that has been racked up by these giant companies will bring the banking and broader financial system down with them.

This time the demand must be to nationalise the banking system and place it under democratic planning and control without compensation to their shareholders. This is contrary to what happened following the 2008 crash in Europe and the US, where the shareholders were bailed out by the state at a cost of trillions of dollars.

In the United States, the top 10% of households own roughly 90% of all shares. While comprehensive ownership data in New Zealand is less publicly detailed, wealth concentration trends suggest a similar skew. Approximately 40% of NZX-listed equity is foreign-owned, raising further questions about where dividend flows ultimately land.

The same could be said for the power companies in New Zealand. The CTU booklet suggests we buy the shares off the private shareholders despite their greedy, destructive enrichment over the past 12 years. My preference is for them to be brought back into full public ownership, without shareholder compensation, given the scale of public harm alleged. for what is criminal, climate denial profiteering.