The Deepest Financial Markets In The World

The U.S. financial markets are often cited as the deepest and most liquid markets in the world.

While this may be true on an absolute basis, it isn't so much relative to GDP.

In a recent report, the McKinsey Global Institute charted the sizes of country stock and bond markets and measured it relative to GDP:

To compare the size of financial systems, we calculate financial depth at the country, regional, and global levels. This is calculated by dividing the financial assets of a country or region, as defined above, by its GDP. There are large variations across countries, and in general countries with higher income levels have deeper financial systems (Exhibit A2).