Read on Twitter
1/n @CathieDWood asserts that US market cap /GDP was 2-3 times higher than it is today in the late 1800s.
2/n She disclosed her source, being " http://Longtermtrends.net "
3/n Let's have a look at that website, indeed we see this chart:
4/n Now right off the bat there's an obvious problem that almost any investor should be able to spot in a nanosecond. The right recent data point has 0.142 for December 2019. Well....
5/n U.S. GDP in 2019 was $21.4 Trillion per the world bank. 0.142 that number = $3 Trillion. See any problems yet? Well the top 2 companies alone in the S&P 500 (Microsoft and Apple) have a $3.9 Trillion market cap. Hello? So let's spend 2 minutes digging
6/n On the chart they give the data sources. So let's double-click on those, shall we, @CathieDWood ?
7/n We can see where they got nominal GDP from, the CBO - quite credible. Let's focus on 1871. We can see nominal GDP at 8.8 Billion.
8/n Now let's click on the Quandl S&P 500 link. we can see the linked data and the chart, and can get the underlying table. You can see the data point of around 4.7 for 1871. So 4.7/8.8 = about 0.53 in the chart.
9/n If you haven't spotted the problem yet, the reference S&P data is the PRICE OF THE INDEX, not the market cap.
10/10 This took me 2 minutes to research and 15 minutes to draft these tweets.
