European leaders have been snubbed in a new ranking of the worlds most powerful people which instead pays homage to the heads of emerging economies and the super-rich. Barack Obama predictably came top in Forbes magazines inaugural list, but he was followed by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, reported telegraph on Thursday. Gordon Brown was ranked 29th and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, came in at a humbling 56th on a list whose selection criteria are - as intended - likely to attract some puzzlement. The only other British entry in the 67-name list was Mark Thompson, the BBC director-general, just scraping in at 65th. After a year in which many financiers have seen their fortunes heavily dented by the economic downturn, Forbes still showed admiration for the simple power of money. The Mexican business tycoon Carlos Slim, the telecommunications giant and the worlds third-richest man, was ranked in sixth place. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, was ranked fourth, and media baron Rupert Murdoch was ranked seventh. The Forbes compilers doffed their caps to the importance of the internet - and again, money - by giving fifth place to Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, and 10th to Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Michael Duke, the chief executive of Wal-Mart, the worlds biggest retailer and biggest US private sector employer, came seventh - more powerful apparently than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the man with control over the worlds biggest oil reserves. Bankers and investors were well-represented in the upper rungs of a decidedly American-centric list - the Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein was 18th, the JP Morgan Chase chief executive James Dimon was 30th and the businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffett beat them both at 14th. Pope Benedict XVI was ranked 11th, Osama bin Laden 37th and the Indian-born industrialist Lakshmi Mittal was 55th. Bill Clinton, long out of office, was ranked 31st. The rankings were put together by five senior Forbes journalists who said they used four main considerations: did the person have influence over lots of people, did they have control over large financial resources, were they powerful in multiple spheres and did they actually use their power. Sarkozy, the premier of the worlds fifth biggest economy, was considered less powerful than the Dalai Lama (39th), the American television presenter Oprah Winfrey (45), the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller (51) and even Joseph Blatter, the president of FIFA, footballs international governing body.