Barack Obama is still the most powerful person in the world. The weekly Forbes says it, which, like every year, has compiled the ranking of the 71 most powerful personalities in the world (exactly 0,000001% of the 7,1 billion of the world's population): in second place is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while on the lowest step of the podium is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two Italians on the list, however, both well positioned: the governor of the ECB Mario Draghi, eighth, and the prime minister Mario Monti, 29th.
The others in the top ten come from the most diverse 'worlds': Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is fourth, Pope Benedict XVI Fifth, followed by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Saudi King Adbullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron. All in all, there are few surprises in the ranking, which includes many well-known names, from financier Warren Buffett to New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, from French president Francois Hollande to his Brazilian counterpart Dilma Roussef, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google to Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric e Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, one of the youngest on the list, who with his 25th place is ahead of our premier.
Among the new entries the co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, 71st, and Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind PayPal and Tesla Motors. Instead they have been excluding Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Chinese President Hu Jintao.
