The Data behind the claim that we can find the $5 trillion now

For some time, I have been arguing that a 1% tax on net wealth, paid by everyone (indviduals, trusts, companies, corporations, wealth funds, and governments) could solve many of the world's problems, including the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis. 

One of my favorite sources of information has been an amazing site called https://companiesmarketcap.com/

The site is a goldmine of incredibly detailed information about 10582 publicly listed comparies. I thank the people at CMC for making this data available. 

The default page lists the companies in terms of Market Cap, led by the 6 US-based tech giants. 

But you can also find lists of the following

• Earnings 
• Revenue 
• Employees 
• Price/Earnings ratio 
• Dividend Yield 
• Operating Margin 
• Cost to borrow
• Total assets 
• Total liabilities 
• Total debt 
• Cash on hand 
• Price to Book ratio 

 But the one that really interests me is the listing of the companies based on 

• Net assets namely, the sum of its assets minus the sum of its liabilities.

 You can see at the top of the listing, that the total net assets of the 10,582 companies is currently $48.141 trillion. You can directly download any of these data sheets as a csv file that can be easily imported to Excel or Google Sheets for further analysis. 

With over $48 trillion in net assets, it is not difficult to see that an annual net wealth tax of 1% would raise an impressive $481 billion in revenue. 

 But the CompanyMarketCap (hence CMC) website offers even more treasures. You just need to click on each company to get full historical records of net assets, including the annual percentage change for each year. For example, here are the links for the first 20 companies in the list.

1. Berkshire Hathaway - $656.74 Billion - up 14.17%
2. ICBC - $559.59 Billion - up 4.82%
3. China Construction Bank - $470.09 Billion - up 7.61%
4. Saudi Aramco - $444.96 Billion - down -5.1%
5. Agricultural Bank of China - $433.11 Billion - up 5.71%
6. Bank of China - $408.96 Billion - up 4.94%
7. JPMorgan Chase - $351.42 Billion - up 5.15%
8. Alphabet (Google) - $345.26 Billion -  up 14.72%
9. Microsoft - $321.89 Billion - up 30.19% 
10. Amazon - $305.86 Billion - up 41.66%
11. Bank of America - $295.58 Billion - up 1.34%
12. Samsung - $276.24 Billion - down -2.51%
13. Exxon Mobil - $269.80 Billion - up 27.32%
14. Toyota - $246.00 Billion -  up 6.06%
15. PetroChina - $243.09 Billion - up 3.69%
16. Volkswagen - $217.60 Billion - down -2.11%
17. Citigroup -  $213.25 Billion - up 1.51%
18. HSBC - $198.11 Billion - down -0.17%
19. CITIC limited - $194.98 Billion - up  5.43%
20. China Mobile - $185.60 Billion - up 0.93%

Now, you could click on the links to get the historical information about net assets for all 10,582 companies, but it would be extremely tedious. I had done the first 100 companies by hand, but then Claude Sonnet 4 gave me an enormous help by writing Python scripts that download the data from the CMC site  and turns them into  Excel readable files! 

There are actually two scripts. One just gets the last couple of years, and calculates the change in net asset value. The second script actually downloads the entire set of historical records.

And that means that any of you will be able to do the same thing as I did.  The first one took about 7 hours to run, but the second, completed the download in just 3.5 hours and terminated at 2h06 this morning. It generated a 19.3 MB excel file. It was then that Claude and I went public at 2h30!

Thanks to this data, I was able to explore the possibile revenue that would be gnerated if, in addition to an annual tax on current net assets, there was a second tax on the increase in net wealth over the past year. Again, the precise rate of the tax can be set at any value. But it is clear that when Amazon's net assets increased by 41.66% in a single year, there could potentially be a lot of tax to pay! 

I then asked Claude to determine values for the annual net asset tax and the annual tax on the increase in net assets that would generate the same amount of revenue.  If the €5 trillion had to be financed entirely by the two taxes applied to corportations, the rates would be high. But the idea is that the same rate woudl be applied to governments and then, a bit later, to the net assets and gains of indviduals.

I think that this could definitely work.