Bailout

Charts of the day, US listings edition

By Felix Salmon

My cunning plan to get my readers to do all the work for me in terms of finding graphs of the number of stocks listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq worked like magic! Here from Second Market, is the chart for the NYSE:

And here’s the Nasdaq:

The big picture here is that both exchanges are declining in terms of number of listings, neither show any signs of recovering any time soon, and in both cases the decline in listings started before the dot-com bubble burst.

Inevitably there’s a bare minimum of listings which the US stock market will asymptotically approach. But this isn’t cyclical, it’s secular. We had our big equities boom from 1950 to 2000, and now it’s over. Even if valuations go back up, the cult of the US stock market as the best and obvious place to invest your money has gone forever, in a world where it’s easier, more lucrative, and less risky to buy bonds or foreign stocks or even commodities than it is to buy General Electric or eBay or Enron.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on January 25, 2011 (boomark / email).