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Comment by scotch_drinker | Hacker News Reader

"On the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world’s largest companies, the first non-financial firm is General Electric, which ranks 44th."

This is even scarier than the apparent fact that econophysics is a real thing. I'd like to know the history of the Forbes Global 2000 to get an idea over time of how dominant financial companies have been. I have a hunch they have always had a part (JP Morgan Chase anyone?) but surely this is a new phenomenon to be so dominated by companies that don't actually produce much.

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If something seems scary/spectacular/surprising it's usually a good idea to do some fact checking. In this case it's very easy, since the authoritative source (Forbes) is available online.

GE is 4th, not 44th. It seems to be a typo.

http://www.forbes.com/global2000/

If you sort by Assets it is 44th alright.

sorting by assets is a weird way to look at things. Given that banks manage people's money, you would expect them to dominate in assets.

market value, profits, number of employees all sound like better metrics to get the "size" of a company. if by "size" you mean the influence it has over the world.

Isn't it round the other way for banks - their assets are things like loans (which are liabilities to the borrowers)?

If you deposit £50 pounds in the bank the cash becomes an asset of the bank and they create a matching liability to you because you probably want your money back at some point in the future....

>If you deposit £50 pounds in the bank the cash becomes an asset of the bank

Deposits are liabilities to a bank.

Yes, but the cash you deposited becomes a balancing asset.... surely (I am not an accountant).

I am not in banking finance but I think the double entry accounting would be if you deposit a $20 bill that physical $20 bill shows up on the "physical stack o cash" as an asset and the other entry (double entry, get it?) shows up as a liability in accounts payable because they owe you $20.

I was in IT at a stock trading firm a long time ago and the limited free training they provided for accounting was probably the most interesting non-job related on the job training I ever attended.

Err...

Banks manage other people's money, meaning they ought to lead in liabilities.

Bank assets primarily are the loans they extend to customers, such as mortgages and car loans -- in theory anyway, since they paper it nowadays to avoid carrying part or all of the risks. They extend these loans by leveraging the money in your CDs and savings accounts. In a sense, they borrow against the money they owe you.

They lead in both, because after all to be solvent their assets have to be at least as large as their liabilities.

The "assets" column seems to be assets not accounting for liabilities. E.g. it lists Fannie Mae as having $3 trillion in assets, which is all of the mortgages it owns. But it also has $3 trillion in liabilities, which means its net equity is only about $7 billion.

When you deposit $50 in a bank and the bank loans it out, the loan is an asset of the bank, but the $50 in your account is a liability. Obviously if you just look at the assets the number looks really big, but the bank's net equity is the difference between the value of the assets and what it owes depositors.

So I'm guessing it's not a typo but instead a way to shape the data to fit the assumptions. Saying GE is 44th on the list is misleading at best and disingenuous for sure. From the wikipedia page on the Forbes list, it's clear that the rankings are based on all four of the measured statistics, not just assets.

It is interesting to me that 5 of the top 10 and all of the top 3 are financial institutions. By comparison to 2012, Only 4 of the top 10 were financial companies and ExxonMobil led the list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_Global_2000

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