Everybody's talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the many related demonstrations around the world. According to Journalism.org, the movement "occupied" 10% of news coverage in the U.S. last week, with commenters' opinions ranging from fervent support to outright disgust. The Wall Street Journal has compiled a few of the most interesting reactions here.

One thing that can't be denied: the protesters are making a lot of noise. And new research from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2011 might just raise the volume. There are some pretty sobering facts in the report, including the statistic that 0.5% of the world's population own 38.5% of the wealth, while the bottom two-thirds account for just 3.3% of wealth.

Those are pretty crazy numbers. Here are some more: another new study analyzing the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has found that only 147 are "superconnected". What does that mean? Basically that a lot of money and power is concentrated in very few hands - and a lot of the 147 companies are banks. Here's an image the researchers released. The yellow dots are 1318 "very connected" companies, and the red are the 147 "superconnected" companies:

The study was conducted by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and is the first of its kind. It's already met with some criticism - Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute, for instance, points out that the study assumes ownership equates to control, which isn't necessarily true - but its findings are still fascinating.

There are some interesting similarities in the numbers. Credit Suisse found that 0.5% of the world's population control 38.5% of the wealth. The Zurich study found that about 40% of the corporate network is controlled by about 1% of companies. So all signs seem to be pointing to the fact that wealth is distributed very unevenly on the world stage.

Speaking of signs, here's one from the protests:



