Pam and Russ Martens (wallstreetonparade) have put together a chart that took them 30 minutes work, they say, which “is proof that anyone among the legions of Wall Street bank regulators at the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC, and the SEC can see what’s coming. They also say:"When the motherlode of stock market bubbles finally pops, exposing the corrupt edifices on which it was built, you can count on one thing for sure—there will be lots of testimony before Congress that no one could have seen it coming.” While, of course, the “GDP”, along with the “stock market value” is also a fictitious number, and therefore the situation is actually far worse than their comparison indicates, the “numbers ratio” the Martenses devise is a useful, though flawed heuristic device that gets across why everyone, including the most morally corrupt, should worry.
The chart compares US GDP to the total stock market value at December 31, 1999, prior to the bursting of the dot.com bubble (“the total stock market value was 1.77 times GDP”;) at December 31, 2007, prior to the bursting of the subprime and derivatives bubble (1.34 times GDP;) and on December 31, 2020, “prior to the bursting of whatever the bailout boys decide to call this bubble.” The chart shows that, at year-end 2020, stock values were at 2.10 times US GDP. Three months later, march 31, 2021, total stock market values had grown further to 49.1 trillion dollars, larger than the combined GDP of China, Japan, Germany and the United States.
