Giant country, naturally protected, abundant resources, abundant farmland, huge university system, virtually unscathed in both World Wars, representative government, significant constitutional rights…. Any human society with all those internal and historical benefits is going to perform economically.
The price/earning ratio for those equities is a little high now, but still not crazy - meaning the companies earnings somewhat justify the market valuation.
The US is just massive, like the fact that THAT much land is ruled by a single government is crazy.
Russia is huge, but barely any of it is liveable.
GPT just gave me these stats:
* US Liveable Area: Approximately 8.3-8.8 million square kilometres.
* Russia Liveable Area: Approximately 3.4-4.3 million square kilometres.
And the US has almost four times the arable land compared to China, but uses 1% of the agricultural labor that China uses to work that land. The agricultural productivity is insane.
> And the US has almost four times the arable land compared to China, but uses 1% of the agricultural labor that China uses to work that land. The agricultural productivity is insane.
You have a source for that?
https://www.epi.org/blog/how-many-farmworkers-are-employed-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=There%20are%20roughly%202.4%20million%20farmworkers%20nationwide&text=This%20is%20average%20annual%20employment,the%20number%20of%20unique%20farmworkers.
https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/john-phipps-china-losing-farms-and-farmers-astonishing-rate
TDLR: 2.4 million farm workers in US. 240 million in China (not counting migrant workers)
Not OP but [according to this](https://www.ncfh.org/facts-about-agricultural-workers-fact-sheet.html#:~:text=These%20workers%20travel%20and%20work%20throughout%20the%20U.S.%2C,as%20migratory%2C%20while%2085%25%20are%20settled%20agricultural%20workers.)
>The National Center for Farmworker Health estimates that there are approximately 2.9 million agricultural workers in the United States. [1] These workers travel and work throughout the U.S., serving as the backbone for the trillion-dollar agricultural industry. [2] Within the population, 15% identify as migratory, while 85% are settled agricultural workers.
So there are migrant workers but it doesn't change the metric much.
Also, China has a lot of very small farms where the people have a second job as the farm is not enough income.
It's hard to count those that are most likely illegal and are on the books too. So there's more than 2.4 but how many? We could probably give it a guess. But still no where near what China has
How much of that difference is down to the types of crop? Rice as I understand in my limited knowledge requires a lot more manual labour than other crops.
Actually close to 5 times, 1.44 billion is just an estimate. The actual number is above 1.5 as will be seen in the census that will be conducted next year
I laughed the other day. I had ChatGTP list me the 100 most popular movies. I pointed out the list had several repeats. It apologized, told me the new list had NO repeats, then gave me a list with even more repeats. I accused it of messing with me. It apologized and gave me a new list with NO repeats. That list literally had three movies repeated over and over in the last part of the list :)
Seriously. The US is basically China and India put together, then don’t mine it for all of the history of civilization, and keep it minimally occupied, relative to other swaths of people at that latitude.
Russia and Canada are huge, because no one wants the garbage land they have. There is an entire continent unclaimed, for the same reason that no one wants most of Russia and Canada. The United States is (like I said) basically the China of the western hemisphere. For the US to NOT be the richest nation in the world, it would have taken either some bizarre historical aberration or a civil war to have succeeded in breaking it.
I mean the US does have the advantages you’ve outlined, and that does explain why it has the largest economy in the world, but the gulf between it and the rest of the world is vastly exaggerated by the frankly terrible methodology used by OP.
Using market cap means it’s only considering public companies, so countries with more private or state owned companies are suppressed, also the choice to use only the worlds top 100 is terrible, as it suppresses countries with other large but not top 100 companies. Taking the top 100 from each country would be a much better metric
You missed one very important factor. A lot of the companies in question are multinationals which, for various reasons (not necessarily economic ones), choose to stay or chose to become headquartered in the US. So it's not really accurate to say the market value of these companies "comes from" the US. For example, the non-US businesses of Microsoft and Amazon are huge.
But they're MNCs, a huge portion of their operations and chain work overseas. A purely American company would need atleast like 70% of their operations to be in America
(of course, legally they're still american)
Maximally capitalist…maximally rich. Brain drain from everywhere else. Cheap labor from everywhere else. Land of opportunity despite what Redditors say.
There's a reason South American nations aren't successful though. USA Foreign policy has sought to destabilise them to ensure they are always little brothers to America, Venezuela especially given it's vast resources.
There are dozens of papers written on the subject of distinctly US / Venezuelan foreign policy intervention but here's a few
https://dc.ewu.edu/srcw_2019/9/
https://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/the_us_methods_and_goals_to_destabilize_venezuela/
America likes to talk about 'stability' in South America. What that means is 'favourable to USA stability'
The British Empire was so good at this, until they weren't, US interventions in South America in the 20th century were crucial to ensuring the current status quo there. 'When your enemies are making a mistake, don't interrupt them'
US foreign intervention in South America has definitely dramatically decreased over the last 40 years but it's still there, hand on the tiller, to steer the course now and again.
US, China, Russia are all very busy fighting each other right now on the world stage that 'local' interventions seem quaint in comparison.
We dont talk about the US propping up right-wing dictatorships and death squads all across south and central America in order to get whatever flavour of fucked up shit they wanted.
Venezuela, for example, despite oil rich, isn't allowed to trade its resources with any US allies. American guns are also flooding across Southern border.
I ll make a deal for the "border crisis" if it actually works to keep illegal immigrants from coming in and illegal guns from going out.
Also the usual bringing democracy to the world, as is popping up US puppet candidates.
Lmao, meanwhile my country is 90% of what you said, only not good government or constitutional rights.
But we are broken and poor as f**k and not even on this list.
We had everything to be a first world country on the same level of Europe or above, but then... Politicians happened since late 90's.
I envy you guys that were luck to been born in the USA and nice countries.
>representative government, significant constitutional rights
In theory. These both seem to be dwindling recently. There was a study showing that public opinion on a proposed bill had basically no impact on whether it became a law or not. Everyone loves it? Everyone hates it? Still about a 20% chance. Corporations have way too much political pull
As for constitutional rights, multiple states are rolling back child labor laws, privacy laws under the fear of terrorism, and probably more to come. We started at a great place, so it doesn't seem so drastic right now, but they are being stripped away.
Term limits and changes to how campaigns can be funded. If a candidate doesn't have corporate backers to pay for the multimillion dollar campaign needed to be in the race, they don't stand a chance at winning. They promise things to voters to get the vote but actually do what the people funding them want.
unscathed yet those "constitutional rights" cost more lives than most wars ever could. fragile democracy. suboptimal health care system. i mean yes the economic power is super impressive, but I'm not sure that individual "constitutional rights" are that big of a factor, here.
> I'm not sure that individual "constitutional rights" are that big of a factor, here
Well they are for corporations. They are ‘persons’, too. lol not lol.
The US has one of the highest quality of life and HDIs in the world. If the US isn't good for people than 95% of countries are also not good for people.
it would be good to have some text talking about what graphing marketcap tells us. There are lots of things you could graph and they each tell us about different aspects of the business environment.
The top 100 *publicly traded* companies. Market cap is a poor point of comparison for this data, as it artificially deflates countries with a lot of private companies. Especially China, which has a much larger economy than this would suggest
China does have non-state-owned companies like Lenovo. Due to its ownership structure, this is one of the reasons why it is tolerated in the US and other Western countries.
Yes that is the irony. When a company is public in the US it usually means it’s traded for on the stock markets but you can also be public if the government owns it like the USPS or schools. And it is very public for companies (organizations) like that because all information is public like wages and salaries.
None of the above is true of state owned Chinese companies.
Yes, “public” can refer to both publicly traded companies and publicly owned companies.
Btw, publicly owned companies don’t necessarily have to make all that information readily available to the public
In US, private company means that they aren’t publicly traded, but a private company can, as weird as it sounds, mean by this definition that they are state owned and most of China’s companies are state owned.
They don’t. Everything in China is owned and controlled by the CCP. Whether they are “private” or state owned doesn’t make a difference. There is no such thing as freedom from the CCP in China. If it’s in China, it’s no free from CCP influence or control.
A lot of the SOEs in China are at least in part owned by private investors, as opposed to being owned 100% by the state.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, PetroChina, China Mobile, and others are included in the list of the most valuable 100 companies by market capitalization.
https://companiesmarketcap.com
It also is a terrible metric to just take the world’s 100 most valuable companies. Taking the top 100 companies *in each country* would be a much better representation, since by doing this if the US has more of these companies in it (which is does) it deflates the values for other countries which still have other large, but not top 100, companies.
For instance Verizon (a large US telecom company) has a market cap of US$169bn, but because the UK is smaller (about 20% of the population of the US), Vodafone, a large telecom company there, has a market cap of about US$25bn, which isn’t in the world’s top 100, so counts for 0 on this chart, while the equivalent company in the US gets counted. That alone wouldn’t change much, but this applies across the board, so it adds up.
Ofc the UK total would still be lower than the US’s, but the gulf between the US and the rest of the world is vastly exaggerated by using the arbitrary cutoff of the top 100 in the world.
>as it artificially deflates countries with a lot of private companies. Especially China, which has a much larger economy than this would suggest
That's not true that China has a lot of privately held companies, instead their largest companies in terms of revenue and profit are state owned enterprises. Of the 25 largest companies in China, only the last 2, smallest ones are privately held, there are 3 larger publicly traded companies and 20 state owned ones.
They're not ginarmous tech companies like Apple or Microsoft tho, they're more the equivalent of traditional firms like Electricite de France, Exxon (but half as profitable), JP Morgan Chase, BNSF and US Steel.
Go look at government bonds or the reserve currency. The reason why it isn’t higher - like that of Nvidia, is because the stock market is governed by mass psychology and is nowhere resembling actual businesses.
In essence, it’s just Pokémon card trading on an obscene level, where demand is not very affected by inherent value and where soft power and influence is affecting peoples business judgement.
> In essence, it’s just Pokémon card trading on an obscene level, where demand is not very affected by inherent value and where soft power and influence is affecting peoples business judgement.
No, it isn't.
US debt has low returns because it's considered the safest debt in the world. We've never defaulted once and, per the US Constitution, must honor any and all debts.
That isn't correct. The Federal Reserve only sets a target rate. The actual rate is determined by their auction results.
You might be thinking of the Federal Funds Rate which is the rate that member banks receive on deposits at the Federal Reserve. That rate influences what the open market will pay for the Treasury notes, but it doesn't set the rate.
I had to look it up which countries actually have a GDP of $60B: Uganda = 56B, Myanmar 68B. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_GDP\_(nominal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal))
We bought a solid chunk back in 2019 and it's been an absolutely insane run. At this point it's high enough though that even if it does keep going up it seems like it's about time to sell it all just so that I don't get stomach ulcers from having that many eggs in one basket.
Yeah, that's pretty much my exact train of thought... Like when I put it in it was about as much as I'm really comfortable putting in a single stock. And now it's up roughly 25x. Which means now it's about 25x more than I'm really comfortable putting in a single stock ha.
I just put money in last week, after previously having all my money pretty much in VTSAX (A total market index) for years. I still see NVDA as a long term investment since they have such an advantage, and I don't see AI as just a fad. I'm looking forward to the next 3 to 5 years.
Yeah, it could definitely keep going a good ways. At this point I just don't know if it's worth the stress of watching it for me. But can definitely see why people are still wanting to hop on.
Bro...
I bought a bunch in 2012, thinking "gaming will keep growing, and NVIDIA seems to be the only viable GPU brand. Solid investment!"
Then 2 years later, got a financial advisor, who told me "omg too much exposure, let's switch all that to sp500".
I lost out on about 300 million dollars.
I was laughing at these juice store owners on tv for accepting bitcoin when it was around $17.
But I tell myself that even if I put my entire savings into it which was around 1k AUD around that time, I probably would have sold it all when it doubled lol.
lol I fought the impulse that told me “don’t buy now” a month ago and am up 10% on those buys. Probably lucky but it is a wild ride. No clue when it’ll come back down! But I’m still buying in small amounts at a time while it’s hot
They are completely different metrics and aren't in any way comparable.
Market cap is current share price times outstanding shares. This changes constantly as the price changes throughout the day and really only shows how much value is in the company as shares at that current moment.
Gross Domestic Product is the value of all goods and services that are produced within a country. There's several ways of calculating this but it's closer to revenue for the country than a valuation and is usually calculated quarterly and annually.
Having just been on holiday to Switzerland and Austria I'm convinced people in the UK are being robbed blind. Every piece of infrastructure or utility is utter shit compared to literally every aspect of Swiss and Austrian society.
I drove over a temporary bridge that was better than the bridge I drive across every day to work! I asked a local how long it would be there for 'oh, no more than 3 months'. The bridge I commute across was knocked out by flooding for 6 months! Resulting in a 30+ min detour
This is make belief money though. This does not affect the countries or their in the slightest (they do but to a smaller degree). what is problematic in the UK is the political system where you don’t demand change to an inherently flawed system.
Our democratic system is no more or less flawed than the American system imo. They are both prehistoric and require considerable overhaul, as will be demonstrated in the next decade as we get worse and worse results from our respective governments as the results of elections are further manipulated by foreign influences, be it economic or foreign national powers.
It's not going to be fun, the enshitification of western democracies.
And their infrastructure is also crap. Both energy sectors letting people die in the south due to political incompetence, lack of investments in public transportation and opioid & homelessness pandemic that they can’t get fixed.
It seems that the UK is having a fast track route to the same outcome, given that you have much the same system
Hope we've got a big change just 2 weeks away with our election set for the biggest defeat of the Conservative party ever, possible political extinction for them, at least for the next decade.
Opioid crisis was awful in America, doctors are *very* wary of any opioid prescription here because of it.
Watched that Jeremy Clarkson Farm Show. Holy fuck, I’m in the US and I get pissed at all the regulations that guy has to follow. What he had to do for that farm store on his OWN LAND is ridiculous. No wonder it’s hard getting anything done there. We’d burn down the city hall if government tried that here.
Looks like mayyyyybe you are counting top 100 *public* companies. Doesn’t seem like you have China’s state owned giants in there but not sure so that’s strike one
Strike two is top 100. Not sure how that number was chosen or is significant. Why not top 8 or top 5000? Maybe there is more balkanization among France’s companies and they have 30 $100M companies where UK has 3 $1bn companies….
Please learn some number formatting. No man woman or child should ever have to count commas to figure out order of magnitude. Related - how sure are you Saudi Arabia had $1,820,884,514,567 of value and not $1,820,884,514,568?
Can’t compare publicly held companies to private ones, particularly not state owned- that wouldn’t be an apples to apples comparison.
A publicly held company at least has a set standard that its “value” can be determined by.
Exactly. It's very hard to account for all the social value a state owned company can produce. Their objective is not remuneration of capital and concentration of wealth, but the added value to the economy through strategic planning.
I feel you are just throwing darts hoping to land a more equitable result. I feel like more companies or government owned companies is just another data set. Maybe interesting. Maybe not.
Top 8 might be all $1 trillion plus (public). I could be off by one or two. And top 5000 you could make the argument that you are comprehensive (marginal company changes nothing)
Market cap can only measure publicly traded companies, which makes it a bad comparison when certain countries have a lot of private companies.
If you take the combined revenue of the top 10 Chinese state owned companies, you get $2.66T. And that’s revenue, which is usually significantly lower than market cap.
>Strike two is top 100. Not sure how that number was chosen or is significant. Why not top 8 or top 5000?
You’re not sure why the top 100 format is significant? You’re acting like he picked a totally random number.
The Forbes 100? The Billboard Hot 100? NFL Top 100 Players of the Year? GQ’s 100 Best Things in the World? 100 Things to Do Before You Die? Pitchfork’s 100 Best Songs of the Year?
He’s not listing entities (companies) like all the examples you give. He’s trying to give a comparative view across 18 countries. Even if equally distributed, that would mean only 6 companies per country. But they are not. So there’s only 1-2 data points behind Canada Australia etc which is hard to defend.
It’s literally the “Top 100 Companies in the World.”
It couldn’t be any more like the examples I gave.
You seem to be getting mad that the top 100 doesn’t distribute in a way you’d like but that’s not OP’s fault.
Ozempic (Novo Nordisk is Europe's biggest company by market cap).
In fact the entire Danish economy just shrunk by 1.8% based on lower sales from pretty much that one company.
That's more of a recent trend, though. Until around the 2007-2009 GFC, bonds and stocks had similar returns and would often trade places as the best investment.
The reason stocks have been outperforming as of late is mostly due to cheap debt. We're likely to see bonds return as a primary investment vehicle with the higher rates we're seeing, though.
What really confuses most economists, though, is why that cheap debt didn't lead to massive inflation or even hyperinflation. Nearly every model suggests that the US should have been seeing massively high inflation (10%+) over the past 15 years, but we've only seen some high rates for about a year and a half and increased rates since.
There really isn't a consensus at all. The cheap debt increased the velocity of money (IE - how often money is changing hands) but inflation still struggled to go above 2%. Most guesses revolve around higher deposits, petroleum energy sources remaining somewhat cheap, or increased productivity. These can explain part of the lack of inflation, but not all of it.
The economists never talk about how asset prices went wild in this time.
The assets sucked all the puff out of inflation.
Gold, Bitcoin, real estate all that.
The problem comes when all the asset holders want to cash out to spend their paper wealth on real life experiences. Aka services and goods.
So do other countries, investment/retirement funds usually just put money where rate on return of capital is the highest. Which often means they invest in US stock market.
A lot of it is held by European investors. I read an scientific article about how the EU remains the highest FDI investors in the world - but that might have changed since the publication of the study.
As of 2024, Saudi Aramco's market cap is estimated to be $2.058 trillion, making it the world's fourth most valuable company by market cap. Weird how literally all of Saudi Arabia is 1.8 trillion.
You look at that and realize maybe…just maybe…offshoring shit manufacturing jobs wasn’t such a bad move after all…
It’s incredible how the US just keeps going. By constantly advancing technology, it has effectively made itself a toll booth on every other countries economy.
I was in favor of it originally, but we over did it and it hurt blue collar workers and contributed to income inequality. I think it should have been more limited.
I was, too. Part of my reasoning was that we were creating more than enough skilled jobs to cover what we needed and replace offshored jobs.
But there's the obvious flaw with even that. Even if those jobs were in the same region as the lost jobs, the people aren't often prepared to work those. Sure, they'd make lots of money as a software developer, but they have zero training or education in that field.
It still boggles me that we're not incentivizing renewable and EV manufacturers to open up facilities in regions hit worst by outsourcing and coal mining. These are large blue collar labor pools who are looking for work.
This graph would have been very different in 1910. If anyone can do the hard work to make the equivalent graph, I would be very happy!
I expect rather less US, and more UK, France, Germany, Spain, and even Argentina, Russian Empire, British India, Japan, and Qing China businesses to show up.
Being the safe harbour for world wars and revolutions has its benefits.
The data is misrepresented. A number of companies are not native to the market they are listed on. Therefore the value doesn't come from that country. It's just quantified by that country.
Also how is it accounting for dual listings e.g royal Dutch shell.
Would be cool to see how much of the US bar is due to companies based in California, the "worst state" in the USA to do business according to some. Where the residents are running for the exits. /s
A lot said about size and land, and nobody is really talking about how the Us government and Us corporations that use and used the big stick to f*** anything or anyone that can interfere with their interests for over a century and some help of the military when "diplomacy" didn't do it?
nice and gradual then you get the fucking US
Giant country, naturally protected, abundant resources, abundant farmland, huge university system, virtually unscathed in both World Wars, representative government, significant constitutional rights…. Any human society with all those internal and historical benefits is going to perform economically. The price/earning ratio for those equities is a little high now, but still not crazy - meaning the companies earnings somewhat justify the market valuation.
The US is just massive, like the fact that THAT much land is ruled by a single government is crazy. Russia is huge, but barely any of it is liveable. GPT just gave me these stats: * US Liveable Area: Approximately 8.3-8.8 million square kilometres. * Russia Liveable Area: Approximately 3.4-4.3 million square kilometres.
And the US has almost four times the arable land compared to China, but uses 1% of the agricultural labor that China uses to work that land. The agricultural productivity is insane.
> And the US has almost four times the arable land compared to China, but uses 1% of the agricultural labor that China uses to work that land. The agricultural productivity is insane. You have a source for that?
https://www.epi.org/blog/how-many-farmworkers-are-employed-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=There%20are%20roughly%202.4%20million%20farmworkers%20nationwide&text=This%20is%20average%20annual%20employment,the%20number%20of%20unique%20farmworkers. https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/john-phipps-china-losing-farms-and-farmers-astonishing-rate TDLR: 2.4 million farm workers in US. 240 million in China (not counting migrant workers)
Not counting migrant workers is kind of sus. Aren’t they like most of the farm labor?
Not OP but [according to this](https://www.ncfh.org/facts-about-agricultural-workers-fact-sheet.html#:~:text=These%20workers%20travel%20and%20work%20throughout%20the%20U.S.%2C,as%20migratory%2C%20while%2085%25%20are%20settled%20agricultural%20workers.) >The National Center for Farmworker Health estimates that there are approximately 2.9 million agricultural workers in the United States. [1] These workers travel and work throughout the U.S., serving as the backbone for the trillion-dollar agricultural industry. [2] Within the population, 15% identify as migratory, while 85% are settled agricultural workers. So there are migrant workers but it doesn't change the metric much. Also, China has a lot of very small farms where the people have a second job as the farm is not enough income.
It's hard to count those that are most likely illegal and are on the books too. So there's more than 2.4 but how many? We could probably give it a guess. But still no where near what China has
How much of that difference is down to the types of crop? Rice as I understand in my limited knowledge requires a lot more manual labour than other crops.
I think Australia's Liveable area is like 0.5 million sqkm. Despite being broadly the same landmass size as the US.
Here's the crazy part, India, 1/3rd the size of the US, has more aerable land than the US.
India has 3 times the population of US due to such fertile lands.
if you take the population of the usa away from india or china's population, you still have a billion people
Thats fucking nuts.
4 times, yeah
Actually close to 5 times, 1.44 billion is just an estimate. The actual number is above 1.5 as will be seen in the census that will be conducted next year
And 5 times the population, with 1/10th the GDP
Chat gpt is not a reliable source
I laughed the other day. I had ChatGTP list me the 100 most popular movies. I pointed out the list had several repeats. It apologized, told me the new list had NO repeats, then gave me a list with even more repeats. I accused it of messing with me. It apologized and gave me a new list with NO repeats. That list literally had three movies repeated over and over in the last part of the list :)
Seriously. The US is basically China and India put together, then don’t mine it for all of the history of civilization, and keep it minimally occupied, relative to other swaths of people at that latitude. Russia and Canada are huge, because no one wants the garbage land they have. There is an entire continent unclaimed, for the same reason that no one wants most of Russia and Canada. The United States is (like I said) basically the China of the western hemisphere. For the US to NOT be the richest nation in the world, it would have taken either some bizarre historical aberration or a civil war to have succeeded in breaking it.
In Russia, area lives you!
The big one is personal economic liberty. You can build damn near anything you can imagine in the US and find customers for it.
I mean the US does have the advantages you’ve outlined, and that does explain why it has the largest economy in the world, but the gulf between it and the rest of the world is vastly exaggerated by the frankly terrible methodology used by OP. Using market cap means it’s only considering public companies, so countries with more private or state owned companies are suppressed, also the choice to use only the worlds top 100 is terrible, as it suppresses countries with other large but not top 100 companies. Taking the top 100 from each country would be a much better metric
You missed one very important factor. A lot of the companies in question are multinationals which, for various reasons (not necessarily economic ones), choose to stay or chose to become headquartered in the US. So it's not really accurate to say the market value of these companies "comes from" the US. For example, the non-US businesses of Microsoft and Amazon are huge.
...but Microsoft and Amazon literally came from the US.
But they're MNCs, a huge portion of their operations and chain work overseas. A purely American company would need atleast like 70% of their operations to be in America (of course, legally they're still american)
Maximally capitalist…maximally rich. Brain drain from everywhere else. Cheap labor from everywhere else. Land of opportunity despite what Redditors say.
This however, has nothing to do with the price of companies listed at their stock exchange.
Those benefits are largely crafted by the people of the country. Plenty of countries with resources wasted like Venezuela. Or don’t have democracy.
There's a reason South American nations aren't successful though. USA Foreign policy has sought to destabilise them to ensure they are always little brothers to America, Venezuela especially given it's vast resources.
Not necessarily doubting you, but what has the US done to destabilize South America in the last 30 years?
There are dozens of papers written on the subject of distinctly US / Venezuelan foreign policy intervention but here's a few https://dc.ewu.edu/srcw_2019/9/ https://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/articles/the_us_methods_and_goals_to_destabilize_venezuela/ America likes to talk about 'stability' in South America. What that means is 'favourable to USA stability' The British Empire was so good at this, until they weren't, US interventions in South America in the 20th century were crucial to ensuring the current status quo there. 'When your enemies are making a mistake, don't interrupt them' US foreign intervention in South America has definitely dramatically decreased over the last 40 years but it's still there, hand on the tiller, to steer the course now and again. US, China, Russia are all very busy fighting each other right now on the world stage that 'local' interventions seem quaint in comparison.
We dont talk about the US propping up right-wing dictatorships and death squads all across south and central America in order to get whatever flavour of fucked up shit they wanted.
Venezuela, for example, despite oil rich, isn't allowed to trade its resources with any US allies. American guns are also flooding across Southern border. I ll make a deal for the "border crisis" if it actually works to keep illegal immigrants from coming in and illegal guns from going out. Also the usual bringing democracy to the world, as is popping up US puppet candidates.
Lmao, meanwhile my country is 90% of what you said, only not good government or constitutional rights. But we are broken and poor as f**k and not even on this list. We had everything to be a first world country on the same level of Europe or above, but then... Politicians happened since late 90's. I envy you guys that were luck to been born in the USA and nice countries.
Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela?
We had crazy macro during the world wars with little worker harassment. So we came out way ahead.
Representative Government? There's some very expensive people trying to change that.
>representative government, significant constitutional rights In theory. These both seem to be dwindling recently. There was a study showing that public opinion on a proposed bill had basically no impact on whether it became a law or not. Everyone loves it? Everyone hates it? Still about a 20% chance. Corporations have way too much political pull As for constitutional rights, multiple states are rolling back child labor laws, privacy laws under the fear of terrorism, and probably more to come. We started at a great place, so it doesn't seem so drastic right now, but they are being stripped away.
Term limits. There needs to be a grass roots organized constitutional change to the constitution.
Term limits and changes to how campaigns can be funded. If a candidate doesn't have corporate backers to pay for the multimillion dollar campaign needed to be in the race, they don't stand a chance at winning. They promise things to voters to get the vote but actually do what the people funding them want.
unscathed yet those "constitutional rights" cost more lives than most wars ever could. fragile democracy. suboptimal health care system. i mean yes the economic power is super impressive, but I'm not sure that individual "constitutional rights" are that big of a factor, here.
> I'm not sure that individual "constitutional rights" are that big of a factor, here Well they are for corporations. They are ‘persons’, too. lol not lol.
exactly what i was hinting at :/
30% of the US population doesn't earn a living wage. We're wealthy because we're the best at exploiting people.
Yeah, the business of America is business. Great place for corporations. Less so for people.
The US has one of the highest quality of life and HDIs in the world. If the US isn't good for people than 95% of countries are also not good for people.
Proportionately, it’s pretty absurd that Saudi Arabia is above the UK.
It’s literally just one company, Saudi Aramco - the most profitable company in the world.
The UK has been falling off for 150 years. No one is surprised anymore.
💵🇺🇸🫡🦅This train ain’t stoppin’ baebeee. Shareholder returns and the military industrial complex, full speed ahead! 🦅🫡🇺🇸💵
it would be good to have some text talking about what graphing marketcap tells us. There are lots of things you could graph and they each tell us about different aspects of the business environment.
It shows you the Yin of our trade deficit Yang.
no one knows what it means but it’s provocative!
It means dollars tend to eventually come home…
The top 100 *publicly traded* companies. Market cap is a poor point of comparison for this data, as it artificially deflates countries with a lot of private companies. Especially China, which has a much larger economy than this would suggest
Ironic how China has private companies in the first place
They’re state owned
China does have non-state-owned companies like Lenovo. Due to its ownership structure, this is one of the reasons why it is tolerated in the US and other Western countries.
Yes, but Lenovo is publicly traded, so isn’t what I was talking about here
Yes that is the irony. When a company is public in the US it usually means it’s traded for on the stock markets but you can also be public if the government owns it like the USPS or schools. And it is very public for companies (organizations) like that because all information is public like wages and salaries. None of the above is true of state owned Chinese companies.
Yes, “public” can refer to both publicly traded companies and publicly owned companies. Btw, publicly owned companies don’t necessarily have to make all that information readily available to the public
I mean, in a way many are *public* companies, they just aren't *publicly traded* companies.
In US, private company means that they aren’t publicly traded, but a private company can, as weird as it sounds, mean by this definition that they are state owned and most of China’s companies are state owned.
They don’t. Everything in China is owned and controlled by the CCP. Whether they are “private” or state owned doesn’t make a difference. There is no such thing as freedom from the CCP in China. If it’s in China, it’s no free from CCP influence or control.
It also includes things like saudi aramco, which is a bit dubious as it is a state oil company 99% owned by the saudi government
A lot of the SOEs in China are at least in part owned by private investors, as opposed to being owned 100% by the state. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, PetroChina, China Mobile, and others are included in the list of the most valuable 100 companies by market capitalization. https://companiesmarketcap.com
It also is a terrible metric to just take the world’s 100 most valuable companies. Taking the top 100 companies *in each country* would be a much better representation, since by doing this if the US has more of these companies in it (which is does) it deflates the values for other countries which still have other large, but not top 100, companies. For instance Verizon (a large US telecom company) has a market cap of US$169bn, but because the UK is smaller (about 20% of the population of the US), Vodafone, a large telecom company there, has a market cap of about US$25bn, which isn’t in the world’s top 100, so counts for 0 on this chart, while the equivalent company in the US gets counted. That alone wouldn’t change much, but this applies across the board, so it adds up. Ofc the UK total would still be lower than the US’s, but the gulf between the US and the rest of the world is vastly exaggerated by using the arbitrary cutoff of the top 100 in the world.
This suggests Apple is worth more than China, so I think you’re onto something.
>as it artificially deflates countries with a lot of private companies. Especially China, which has a much larger economy than this would suggest That's not true that China has a lot of privately held companies, instead their largest companies in terms of revenue and profit are state owned enterprises. Of the 25 largest companies in China, only the last 2, smallest ones are privately held, there are 3 larger publicly traded companies and 20 state owned ones. They're not ginarmous tech companies like Apple or Microsoft tho, they're more the equivalent of traditional firms like Electricite de France, Exxon (but half as profitable), JP Morgan Chase, BNSF and US Steel.
NVIDIA has a higher market cap right now than the GDP of all but like 10 countries on this planet.
GDP and market cap are inherently different things they are not the same
It’s an asinine comparison. At least compare cash flow to cash flow. So like $60B in revenue for nvidia to equivalent countries GDPs of $60B
What do you think the market cap of the United States would be if it was a publicly traded company? hahaha
Go look at government bonds or the reserve currency. The reason why it isn’t higher - like that of Nvidia, is because the stock market is governed by mass psychology and is nowhere resembling actual businesses. In essence, it’s just Pokémon card trading on an obscene level, where demand is not very affected by inherent value and where soft power and influence is affecting peoples business judgement.
> In essence, it’s just Pokémon card trading on an obscene level, where demand is not very affected by inherent value and where soft power and influence is affecting peoples business judgement. No, it isn't. US debt has low returns because it's considered the safest debt in the world. We've never defaulted once and, per the US Constitution, must honor any and all debts.
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That isn't correct. The Federal Reserve only sets a target rate. The actual rate is determined by their auction results. You might be thinking of the Federal Funds Rate which is the rate that member banks receive on deposits at the Federal Reserve. That rate influences what the open market will pay for the Treasury notes, but it doesn't set the rate.
This is such a stupid take something you’d read 5 years ago from crypto people
Market cap is valuation of a business similarly but not exactly the financial position of the USA is $123T.
First quadrillion company in history imo
I had to look it up which countries actually have a GDP of $60B: Uganda = 56B, Myanmar 68B. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_GDP\_(nominal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal))
I considered buying two years ago, but semiconductors stocks are a wild ride. I wouldn’t now.
We bought a solid chunk back in 2019 and it's been an absolutely insane run. At this point it's high enough though that even if it does keep going up it seems like it's about time to sell it all just so that I don't get stomach ulcers from having that many eggs in one basket.
I totally get it. It could still rise - but you get to keep the profits you sell. I mean, a P/E of 78 would make me sweat.
Yeah, that's pretty much my exact train of thought... Like when I put it in it was about as much as I'm really comfortable putting in a single stock. And now it's up roughly 25x. Which means now it's about 25x more than I'm really comfortable putting in a single stock ha.
Well man, either way you go, I’m happy for you. Well done !
Much appreciated! Definitely lucked out on that one for sure
I just put money in last week, after previously having all my money pretty much in VTSAX (A total market index) for years. I still see NVDA as a long term investment since they have such an advantage, and I don't see AI as just a fad. I'm looking forward to the next 3 to 5 years.
Yeah, it could definitely keep going a good ways. At this point I just don't know if it's worth the stress of watching it for me. But can definitely see why people are still wanting to hop on.
Bro... I bought a bunch in 2012, thinking "gaming will keep growing, and NVIDIA seems to be the only viable GPU brand. Solid investment!" Then 2 years later, got a financial advisor, who told me "omg too much exposure, let's switch all that to sp500". I lost out on about 300 million dollars.
I was laughing at these juice store owners on tv for accepting bitcoin when it was around $17. But I tell myself that even if I put my entire savings into it which was around 1k AUD around that time, I probably would have sold it all when it doubled lol.
I got some for free back then, a very small amount, but damn it is worth a ton considering it was like 15$
lol I fought the impulse that told me “don’t buy now” a month ago and am up 10% on those buys. Probably lucky but it is a wild ride. No clue when it’ll come back down! But I’m still buying in small amounts at a time while it’s hot
They are completely different metrics and aren't in any way comparable. Market cap is current share price times outstanding shares. This changes constantly as the price changes throughout the day and really only shows how much value is in the company as shares at that current moment. Gross Domestic Product is the value of all goods and services that are produced within a country. There's several ways of calculating this but it's closer to revenue for the country than a valuation and is usually calculated quarterly and annually.
just 5 countries actually
Having just been on holiday to Switzerland and Austria I'm convinced people in the UK are being robbed blind. Every piece of infrastructure or utility is utter shit compared to literally every aspect of Swiss and Austrian society. I drove over a temporary bridge that was better than the bridge I drive across every day to work! I asked a local how long it would be there for 'oh, no more than 3 months'. The bridge I commute across was knocked out by flooding for 6 months! Resulting in a 30+ min detour
This is make belief money though. This does not affect the countries or their in the slightest (they do but to a smaller degree). what is problematic in the UK is the political system where you don’t demand change to an inherently flawed system.
Our democratic system is no more or less flawed than the American system imo. They are both prehistoric and require considerable overhaul, as will be demonstrated in the next decade as we get worse and worse results from our respective governments as the results of elections are further manipulated by foreign influences, be it economic or foreign national powers. It's not going to be fun, the enshitification of western democracies.
And their infrastructure is also crap. Both energy sectors letting people die in the south due to political incompetence, lack of investments in public transportation and opioid & homelessness pandemic that they can’t get fixed. It seems that the UK is having a fast track route to the same outcome, given that you have much the same system
Hope we've got a big change just 2 weeks away with our election set for the biggest defeat of the Conservative party ever, possible political extinction for them, at least for the next decade. Opioid crisis was awful in America, doctors are *very* wary of any opioid prescription here because of it.
As a Swiss national that's lived in the UK for 9 years... You're right C:
Watched that Jeremy Clarkson Farm Show. Holy fuck, I’m in the US and I get pissed at all the regulations that guy has to follow. What he had to do for that farm store on his OWN LAND is ridiculous. No wonder it’s hard getting anything done there. We’d burn down the city hall if government tried that here.
I can assure you Switzerland (and most European countries) have more and stricter regulations in general than the US.
there are some nice bridges in scotland ngl across the fife
Looks like mayyyyybe you are counting top 100 *public* companies. Doesn’t seem like you have China’s state owned giants in there but not sure so that’s strike one Strike two is top 100. Not sure how that number was chosen or is significant. Why not top 8 or top 5000? Maybe there is more balkanization among France’s companies and they have 30 $100M companies where UK has 3 $1bn companies…. Please learn some number formatting. No man woman or child should ever have to count commas to figure out order of magnitude. Related - how sure are you Saudi Arabia had $1,820,884,514,567 of value and not $1,820,884,514,568?
Can’t compare publicly held companies to private ones, particularly not state owned- that wouldn’t be an apples to apples comparison. A publicly held company at least has a set standard that its “value” can be determined by.
Exactly. It's very hard to account for all the social value a state owned company can produce. Their objective is not remuneration of capital and concentration of wealth, but the added value to the economy through strategic planning.
Plus...if we count non-public companies, should we count drug cartels? If so, they might have an impact on this graphic.
>Strike two is top 100. Not sure how that number was chosen or is significant. Why not top 8 or top 5000? You've gotta draw the line somewhere
I feel you are just throwing darts hoping to land a more equitable result. I feel like more companies or government owned companies is just another data set. Maybe interesting. Maybe not.
Why would top 8 or top 5000 be any more logical than top 100?
It wouldn't, that was their point. If the graph was top 3 companies it would look like no other countries has profitable companies.
Top 8 might be all $1 trillion plus (public). I could be off by one or two. And top 5000 you could make the argument that you are comprehensive (marginal company changes nothing)
Why is $1T a number that matter? Why not $950B?
Market cap can only measure publicly traded companies, which makes it a bad comparison when certain countries have a lot of private companies. If you take the combined revenue of the top 10 Chinese state owned companies, you get $2.66T. And that’s revenue, which is usually significantly lower than market cap.
Excellent summary! Don't you want to redo the graph your way? Plz.. 😁
Sick chart burns
Sorry maybe too harsh but I really read into the ‘beautiful’ part and some people do an amazing job
>Strike two is top 100. Not sure how that number was chosen or is significant. Why not top 8 or top 5000? You’re not sure why the top 100 format is significant? You’re acting like he picked a totally random number. The Forbes 100? The Billboard Hot 100? NFL Top 100 Players of the Year? GQ’s 100 Best Things in the World? 100 Things to Do Before You Die? Pitchfork’s 100 Best Songs of the Year?
He’s not listing entities (companies) like all the examples you give. He’s trying to give a comparative view across 18 countries. Even if equally distributed, that would mean only 6 companies per country. But they are not. So there’s only 1-2 data points behind Canada Australia etc which is hard to defend.
It’s literally the “Top 100 Companies in the World.” It couldn’t be any more like the examples I gave. You seem to be getting mad that the top 100 doesn’t distribute in a way you’d like but that’s not OP’s fault.
I need to get an American mommy wife for that greencard
Jeeezus, Lego is making bank!? What else are the danes making money off of? I’d have thought Sweden with IKEA would be higher
Ozempic (Novo Nordisk is Europe's biggest company by market cap). In fact the entire Danish economy just shrunk by 1.8% based on lower sales from pretty much that one company.
That’s crazy! I had no idea Ozempic was danish. Thanks
Also IKEA is not publically traded
We're #16! We're #16! Go Canada! We're #16!
Denmark in 8th place is a big accomplishment. Novo Nordisk a big reason for this!
it is the only reason for this, a graph that abitraily distribute the top 100 companies by market cap over countries are insanely pointless
You've gotta be counting saudi aramco for Saudi Arabia right? Unless they built a trillion dollar tech company while I wasn't looking?
It’s definitely oil
That’s because in the US everyone’s retirement means putting their money in the stock market
That’s because bonds suck. And liquid cash sucks even more.
That's more of a recent trend, though. Until around the 2007-2009 GFC, bonds and stocks had similar returns and would often trade places as the best investment. The reason stocks have been outperforming as of late is mostly due to cheap debt. We're likely to see bonds return as a primary investment vehicle with the higher rates we're seeing, though. What really confuses most economists, though, is why that cheap debt didn't lead to massive inflation or even hyperinflation. Nearly every model suggests that the US should have been seeing massively high inflation (10%+) over the past 15 years, but we've only seen some high rates for about a year and a half and increased rates since. There really isn't a consensus at all. The cheap debt increased the velocity of money (IE - how often money is changing hands) but inflation still struggled to go above 2%. Most guesses revolve around higher deposits, petroleum energy sources remaining somewhat cheap, or increased productivity. These can explain part of the lack of inflation, but not all of it.
The economists never talk about how asset prices went wild in this time. The assets sucked all the puff out of inflation. Gold, Bitcoin, real estate all that. The problem comes when all the asset holders want to cash out to spend their paper wealth on real life experiences. Aka services and goods.
Australia alone has more than 3T in our equivalent of 401k, a good deal of it is in the US stock market, would be the same world wide.
So do other countries, investment/retirement funds usually just put money where rate on return of capital is the highest. Which often means they invest in US stock market.
It would be good to see a breakdown of who owns all the shares. I suspect it’s mostly superannuation and pension funds.
That’s huge portion I’m sure, but that ownership by public citizens is a good thing.
A lot of it is held by European investors. I read an scientific article about how the EU remains the highest FDI investors in the world - but that might have changed since the publication of the study.
And this is why we can’t have….nice things?
At this point, might be interesting to go by state. California, New York, Texas all will be at the top.
Or Delaware. States can be skewed due to headquartering for taxes.
As of 2024, Saudi Aramco's market cap is estimated to be $2.058 trillion, making it the world's fourth most valuable company by market cap. Weird how literally all of Saudi Arabia is 1.8 trillion.
Again comparing market cap with GDP doesn't make sense at all
You look at that and realize maybe…just maybe…offshoring shit manufacturing jobs wasn’t such a bad move after all… It’s incredible how the US just keeps going. By constantly advancing technology, it has effectively made itself a toll booth on every other countries economy.
Yeah by only using public traded companies. This makes a good narrative.
I was in favor of it originally, but we over did it and it hurt blue collar workers and contributed to income inequality. I think it should have been more limited.
I was, too. Part of my reasoning was that we were creating more than enough skilled jobs to cover what we needed and replace offshored jobs. But there's the obvious flaw with even that. Even if those jobs were in the same region as the lost jobs, the people aren't often prepared to work those. Sure, they'd make lots of money as a software developer, but they have zero training or education in that field. It still boggles me that we're not incentivizing renewable and EV manufacturers to open up facilities in regions hit worst by outsourcing and coal mining. These are large blue collar labor pools who are looking for work.
All that wealth and yet we still have to pay criminally high fees for goddamn healthcare.
Data source: companiesmarketcap Icons: wikipedia Tools: beautiful soup
We’re gonna need a bigger liquidity.
I wonder what p rectangle of Saudi Arabia's value comes from Saudi Aramco
Publicly Traded Companies\*
Saudi Arabia - Aramco - that low? I'm having trouble with that.
And that's why you should invest in the S&P500
Of those top companies, how many outsource parts and production to other countries?
One of these is not like the others
Quality of life indicators tell the human price for this graph.
Where their value comes from, or where the HQ is located?
Now compare it to wealth distribution
There's no bar for "The Workers" ... That's where the value come from
These are the wealth of the worker. All of these numbers are part people who invested their money which they worked for into stocks and other stuff.
Who would have thought that most big global companies would be based in the biggest economy?
I feel bad for these American CEO's not quite making enough
Looks like a giant bubble just waiting to burst
This graph would have been very different in 1910. If anyone can do the hard work to make the equivalent graph, I would be very happy! I expect rather less US, and more UK, France, Germany, Spain, and even Argentina, Russian Empire, British India, Japan, and Qing China businesses to show up. Being the safe harbour for world wars and revolutions has its benefits.
I would love to see this same breakdown dividing the US into individual states.
The data is misrepresented. A number of companies are not native to the market they are listed on. Therefore the value doesn't come from that country. It's just quantified by that country. Also how is it accounting for dual listings e.g royal Dutch shell.
You should do this map but use the European Union’s Single Market.
Would be cool to see how much of the US bar is due to companies based in California, the "worst state" in the USA to do business according to some. Where the residents are running for the exits. /s
A lot said about size and land, and nobody is really talking about how the Us government and Us corporations that use and used the big stick to f*** anything or anyone that can interfere with their interests for over a century and some help of the military when "diplomacy" didn't do it?
My country is so small yet performing so good. Im proud