Financial-Monopoly Groups, an organisational form of the domination of finance capital, an aggregate of industrial, bank, credit, insurance, transport, trade and other companies under the control of one or several closely associated magnates. The group has a head enterprise (a big bank, an industrial trust, an insurance company, etc.) which evolves a common policy for its members. Its principal commercial operations are conducted through the head bank or its branches. The power of the leaders in the group of capital magnates is based primarily on the holding system, personal union and certain other forms of 141 domination. Financial-monopoly groups are the centres of the economic power and political influence of the monopoly bourgeoisie. With the industrial and trade associations and the imperialist state, they direct economic, financial, credit, investment, research, technical, social, ideological and military policy, and influence the market, direct economic expansion and foreign policy acts of fundamental importance. In the mid-1970s there were about 30 big financial-monopoly groups in the USA, 10 to 15 in Britain and France each, nearly ten in Japan and about the same number in West Germany, and in some smaller industrialised West European countries, such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium—the big “threes” or “fours”. They have changed considerably in character during the postwar years. Unions and alliances of financial magnates, linked not only by family, but above all, by business ties, have replaced the formerly dominating individual family oligarchies. The reactionary role of the financialmonopoly groups has intensified in the wake of the deepening and aggravating general crisis of capitalism.