Thursday, January 24, 2008

And Here's Why Bill Is An Economic Moron

The top chart above shows the decline in the U.S. share of world stock market capitalization from more than 50% in 2001, to less than a third in 2007 (32.8%), using data from the World Federation of Exchanges. Even though the U.S. Stock market capitalization has increased in each of the last five years, the explosive growth in many of the emerging markets has caused the U.S. share of world stock value to decline. In other words, the relatively poor countries are getting richer, and the relatively rich U.S. gets richer, but the "poor" are getting rich even faster. That's great.

Likewise, even though U.S. GDP has increased this year at a healthy 3.1% rate, our share of world GDP growth has fallen below 30% (see bottom chart above), due to the even greater growth in the emerging economies like China and India.