The global stock market: 1899 vs. 2014
The global stock market looks very different today than is did 115 years ago.
From Credit Suisse's new Global Investment Returns Yearbook:
"Figure 1 shows the relative market capitalizations of world equity markets at our base date of end-1899. Figure 2 shows how they had changed by end-2014. Markets that are not included in the Yearbook dataset are colored black. As these pie charts show, the Yearbook covered 98% of the world equity market in 1900 and 91% at end-2014."
The New York Stock Exchange had been in operation for under a century in 1899. Today, the market capitalization of listed companies is $28 trillion, and the US stock market is bigger than all its other major counterparts combined.
The explosion of China's stock market is also apparent. It's 2.2% of the global market, despite only opening in November 1990.
