OPEC Oil Reserves Worth 3X As Much As All Companies on All World Stock Exchanges Combined

From/via Clusterstock:

...To understand the magnitude of the forces in play it is instructive to visualize the scale of OPEC’s wealth in comparison to that of consuming countries: imagine that OPEC members are corporations and a barrel of oil is a share. At $125 oil, OPEC’s market capitalization based on its proven reserves stands today at roughly $137 trillion. This is roughly equivalent to the value of the world’s total financial assets--stocks, bonds, other equities, government and corporate debt and bank deposits--or roughly three times the market capitalization of all the companies traded in the world’s top 27 stock markets.

Such monumental wealth potential will translate into unprecedented buying power for the oil countries. For demonstration sake, at $200 oil OPEC could potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple Computer in a week and General Motors in just 3 days. It would take less than two years of production for OPEC to own a 20 percent stake (which essentially ensures a voting block in most corporations) in every S&P 500 company....