Now, we did not invent stocks in the United States of America. I wanted to show market capitalization. Remember, we defined that market capitalization is the price per share multiplied by the number of shares, and this is common stock. I'll define that in a minute. I just took some, kind of the latest year I could get data, shows the market cap in trillions of US dollars by country. Just for a random selection of countries that I picked. And here is the market cap as a percent of annual GDP. So the United States leads the pack, for now. United States did not invent corporate stock, although it was here in the United States that a general limited liability law was invented. And that may be a head start that this country got to impetus towards huge stock market valuation. But as of 2014, the market capitalization of the US stock market was 26 trillion. Actually, it hasn't changed a whole lot since then, because 2014 was a peak. 2015 was flat, 2016 is down so far, so it's something like that now, at 151% of GDP. No other country comes close, but I think if you put the EU together, I didn't do that, that's the European Union, it comes somewhat close. Here's one EU country. The stock market as a percent of GDP is lower than the US, but they have a very large GDP. Canada is a little bit less capitalist. See, we're really capitalists in this country. We have a big stock market, it's all traded. A lot of this isn't owned by Americans by the way. The Chinese love the US stock market and they would invest in it more if there weren't regulations in China making that difficult. But America is for sale, but I should add, the US Stock Market is not America. It's a particular thing, it's a particular contract. It's a claim on earnings of the corporate sector. And there's much more to this country, and to any country, than the stock market. So I don't want to overplay it. Okay, just to give another perspective, this is now about the United States. The Federal Reserve Board of Governors has a balance sheet for households and non profits. They lump in non profits with households, which I think is unfortunate, but they're small, it's basically households. So what's the total wealth tangible? We're not including human capital. You can compute a present value of your lifetime income. For each of you, that would be in the many millions, I'm hoping. [LAUGH] Not for each of you, some of you won't do that. [LAUGH] But most of you, because you'll live a long time and earn money for a long time. But what is the tangible assets that we can quantify and value through markets? According to the Federal Reserve, as of 2014, these assets were worth $98 trillion US. It asks people to add up everything they own, their house, their stocks, their bonds, everything. Add that number for every household, and you get almost $100 trillion. But people don't own it free and clear, they have liabilities. For example, typically they borrowed money to buy the house, so they have debt. So we want to subtract off those liabilities. The total value of those liabilities in 2014 was 14 trillion. So that leaves the total net worth of households in the United States at 84 trillion. That's quite a bit more than the stock market. Now corporate equities own directly, now equities, that's the same as stock, common stock. Households own directly 13.9 trillion, that's less than half of the stock market. They tended to own it in other forms like mutual funds which are, as of 2014, were almost 8 trillion. What are mutual funds? They are collections of investments made by a investment company, who then sell shares to the public. Now this includes, I believe, other, not just corporate stocks, but also it definitely includes bonds and other investments that mutual funds might make. But it's mostly stocks, and pension funds, 20.6 trillion. Those are investment companies that save for your retirement. Your employer typically gives you one. This is not social security, social security is a government pension fund. But companies also, as a compensation to their employees, give them pension funds. And the pension funds invest and typically buy stocks. Now you'ill note that these numbers add up to more than 26 trillion, which is my market cap for the stock market. But that's because pension funds also invest in bonds and other things. And then the balance sheet for the Table B101 also includes the value of real estate owned directly by households, that's mostly single family homes. It also includes vacation homes, some households have investment properties, so the total value of real estate owned by household. Then I have to say in parentheses, and non profits is 23.7 trillion. Bigger than the stock market? No, not quite. Bigger than the direct holdings on the stock market, close to twice as big. So even in America most people are not that into stock market investing. I think it might be very smart policy not to buy a home, to rent a home and invest in a broadly diversified portfolio which that should be less risky. But most people don't do that, and maybe they have good reasons.
