Open goal

A decade ago, bankers were not merely the masters of Davos, but the ‘masters of the universe’. No one calls them that any more. It is a mark of how far the global economy has shifted that the market capitalisation of Goldman Sachs was this week overtaken by that of Netflix, the online entertainment company. The world’s five largest companies are now all in the field of technology and the internet: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Ten years ago, none of them made the top five: the masters, then, were Exxon, Walmart, China National Petroleum and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

We are in a period of unparalleled innovation, where ideas rather than large amounts of capital or manpower can create (and fell) commercial giants in a very short space of time. But one other factor unites the top five high-fliers of the corporate world: they are all American.