Bailout

Stock-listings charts of the day

By Felix Salmon

Guan Yang sends over a couple more charts showing the total number of stocks listed on US exchanges. First there’s the NYSE, Amex, and Nasdaq combined: this one goes back to 1973, and has never been lower.

And here’s the data just for the NYSE, going back all the way to 1926:

It’s pretty clear that the total number of stocks peaked with the dot-com bubble, and is now on a long-term secular downtrend. As a result, the stock market is increasingly failing to act as a proxy for the economy as a whole. Which is one more reason to stop obsessing whether or the stock market is up or down. That never mattered much, and it will matter even less in future.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on February 03, 2011 (boomark / email).