I started this file as I was working on an history of the Sixth World. At start, I wanted to clarify the topic of US Supreme Court decisions who gave corporations extraterritoriality. I often try to shed a slightly different light, more realistic or at least that seems more realistic. I often read people on forums who consider that there was no way the Supreme Court could take the decision it was supposed to have. Since these events must take place in the Sixth World timeline, I searched for the best approximation I could find. Since 2010, many underlined that Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) granted moral persons the same right than physical persons of freedom of expression to weight in the political debate. Practically, this decision open the possibility for major companies to interfere in the democratic process and gain even more sway with the government that they did previously. A Shadowrun reboot would probably use this decision as the foundation for the megacorporate system. But, as of now, this does not match the events as they were described. So I started searching among the Supreme Court major decisions in real life for one the meaning could be diverted to reach the desired result.

What I was searching for without knowing it, was Lochner v. New York (1905), whose reach was so important that American legal experts call "Lochner era" the period between 1897 and 1937 when the Supreme Court delivered decisions that were widely in favor of freedom of trade, to the expense of the government. I then searched for how the reasoning of West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) could be manipulated to bring US justice back. Obviously, I don't have the legal knowledge to develop a true argument that could withstand an actual scrutiny. There probably are many other judicial decisions that could totally invalidate my line of reasoning. It works because Shadowrun history tells us how the judges of the Supreme Court will vote anyway.

I wanted the end of the article to cover the consequences of the Supreme Court decision in the rest of the world. An almost immediate tranposition of an US judicial decision doesn't seem very likely. So I invented a liberal economic policy in Europe (that some have been advocating for years) which would be flaged and wrongly considered as adopting corporate extraterritoriality. Moving on, I pursued with the events that followed, to finally cover almost all of Shadowrun megacorporate history. I touched the specific history of Ares, BMW and Renraku, with more details than what has been written so far in the sourcebooks. I also give an explanation for the nuyen I imagined a while ago, who seems more logical to me (as far as Shadows of Asia goes, the nuyen was first a corporate currency, before being adopted by the Japanese and taken over by the ZOG), along with the way the Zurich-Orbital Geimenshaft Bank replaced the World Bank. The last part, on "recent" corporate wars, is only a summary of information that can be found in Aztlan and Blood in the Boardroom. I only elaborate further on Wuxing entrace on the Corporate Court, as a way to disarm the PPG threat, that fits well within the string of events depicted.

This file is based on a lot of different sourcebooks, including Corporate Shadowfiles, Aztlan, Blood in the Boardroom, Corporate Download and Corporate Guide. As a consequence, unless you studied each closely, it can be difficult sometimes to know what's part of the canon, and what is my own invention.

By the way, Sixth World Almanac gives precise dates for the Supreme Court decisions and the surrounding events:
1999-04-12: rioters attack Seretech assets in New York
1999-10-26: US v. Seretech Supreme Court decision
2000-11-08: Shiawase nuclear reactor comes online
2000-12-14: The NRC initiates judicial proceedings against Shiawase after the terrorist attack
2001-02-12: NRC v. Shiawase Supreme Court decision
I choose not to mention or use them, especially the last, because the timing is ridiculously short for the case to reach the Supreme Court, be heard, and the decision rendered.

The final box on economical theory is a bit short. Murray Rothbard, who advocated total privatization of state duties, was the most obvious choice. However, I think it is not as simple as putting an ultra-liberal label on Shadowrun corporate system. It is pretty far from pure and perfect competition: the largest corporations get the benefits of extraterritoriality, and have both legal and illegal means to eliminate new and smaller competitors. Such system is actually fairly conservative, where newcomers can hardly move up the ranks. Shadowrun paradigm is that money matters little, knowledge does. Megacorporations are ready to take risks and spend money to exfiltrate a scientist or acquire research data. Such key role for innovation rather points toward Joseph Schumpeter theory. The scarcity of natural resources is a fact, while human, industrial and financial capital is available in excess. Megacorporations control the economy because they are the only one wit the know-how to make products as complex as biological implants or virtual reality software. Which brings us back to Schumpeter theory that innovation is the best profit maker.
I often use the "entry ticket cost" expression to explain how an entrepreneur could get in the automotive industry with a workshop and a dozen of workers at the beginning of the 20th century, while by the beginning of the 21st century, he would need hundred of engineers and contractors to conceive a modern car that could rival with the competition, without violating any patent. In the end, a lot of the major companies currently are dependent on the small number of companies who master computer processors and memories conception. We're far from megacorporations' vertical integration, who rather tend to limit the number of suppliers they may depend on.

There are other parts of the Sixth World economy who would deserve a theoritical study, but I was already getting away from my topic and I didn't have a known economists with related theories whose name I could have put in front of it (I guess I could have invented some 21st century economist instead). For the record, I will mention here megacorporation shareholding structure, which is completely different from that of large companies nowadays. While the megacorporations are supposed to be much larger, they usually have a very small number of shareholders, most of them individual shareholders, with long-term investment strategy (only a few points moved in the twenty years between Corporate Shadowfiles in 2054 and Corporate Guide in 2072). In fact, the financial sector as we know it no longer exist or is at least significantly smaller. There no longer are any powerful investment funds, and most banks belongs to industrial groups, in a way reminiscent of the Japanese Zaibatsu. The steadiness of shareholding suggest the prime megacorporations rarely emit shares, if ever, and probably fund investments through loans (which is the raison d'être of the Zurich Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank). Pension funds may have been replaced by insurances each megacorporation would provide their employees with. A megacorporation operates in enough different activities for its cach investment to be as diversified as a fund through the market. The sole existence of megacorporations suppose that they can efficiently manage different activities, which is not considered possible nowadays (that's the reason for the "conglomerate discount" that apply to the stock of diversified companies).