It used to be that you would only hear of plotlines like this in the context of sci-fi, in which evil entities use a virus to put massive oil tankers in a position to be capsized or use subsidiaries to move around strategically important metals and secretly corner the market.
But these sorts of leeching global finance corporations are viruses, self-propagating and endangering our lives. And they are the result of a singularity—a corporate one, in which corporations now have both the rights and intelligence of humans and the global reach of nonhuman networks. Hello, Da Vinci virus! Hello, Skynet! They're already here.
Cross-posted here in the MetaFilter thread about investment banks manipulating metals markets.