American stock markets have dominated global trading for most of the last 120 years. Here’s how other big economies measure up

Indeed, U.S. stocks have dominated global investing, as measured by market capitalization, for most of the past 125 years. For that, you can partly thank New Deal­–era regulations that tamed the Wild West of U.S. markets, making them attractive to risk-averse investors worldwide. And compared with China, where state-owned companies drive the economy, the U.S. gets more growth from publicly traded companies. But supremacy can be fleeting. Just ask Japan, whose markets soared in the late 1980s, only to nose-dive amid asset bubbles and massive overborrowing. In other words: Don’t get too cocky, U.S. stock bulls.

This article appears in the April/May 2024 issue of Fortune with the headline, “An American century (and more) for stocks.”