While AAPL may well become the first $1 trillion market cap company (Carl Icahn's recently top-ticking tweets notwithstanding), did you know that AAPL is now bigger than the entire market cap of all Spanish stocks combined?
Or that Austria's $99 billion gross market cap is the size of Mastercard.
Or that Finland's entire stock market is about the size of Verizon?
Because while Chuck Palahniuk may have been joking about corporations taking over the universe...
"When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks"
... they have already put the old continent in the dust.
The following map from Goldman compares the entire market cap of various European companies to assorted standalone US corporations. The result is just a touch eerie.
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