From freemasons to the Council on Foreign Relations to Bilderberg, the belief that secretive groups control the world’s economic and political system are quite possibly as old as human civilization itself.

But while Occupy Wall Street protestors may be slightly exaggerating in calling themselves the 99 per cent, a recent study conducted by the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich shows that they aren’t too far off the mark.

Drawing from a 2007 Orbis database, which lists 37 million companies and investors spanning the globe, the researchers focused on 43,000 transnational corporations and the share ownership which connected them.

Based on their analysis, the Swiss team found that a core of companies, the majority of which are in the banking sector, yield excessive power over the global economy, the weekly New Scientist magazine reports.

Within this group, 1,318 companies with intertwined ownership structures were on average connected to 20 other companies.