Why the American stockmarket reigns supreme

IF YOU had invested $10,000 in the American stockmarket at the end of the year 2000 you would have had about $27,000, after adjusting for inflation, by the end of 2023. If you had invested in global equities excluding America, you would have had only about $16,000. Wall Street’s outperformance this century has propelled America’s stockmarket to a 61% share of global market capitalisation. That has not surpassed the all-time high reached during the 1960s, but it is close (see chart). And it is close even though America dominates the real economy far less than it did half a century ago, before the rise of Asian emerging-market giants and the fall of the Soviet Union. America’s share of the global stockmarket is 2.3 times its share of GDP—a ratio that has never been higher.