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.
GE is 4th, not 44th. It seems to be a typo.
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.
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.
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....
Deposits are liabilities to a bank.
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.
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.
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.