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Money For the Rest of Us

U.S. Stocks Have Never Been This Overhyped or Expensive

Money For the Rest of Us

J. David Stein

Economy, Economics, Investing Podcast, Business, Investing

4.3 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What are the tangible and intangible factors that have contributed to long-term U.S. stock market outperformance compared to the rest of the world? Despite these advantages, why might we still want to continue to be globally diversified?

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Show Notes

American productivity still leads the world—The Economist

The Outlook for Long-Term Economic Growth by Charles I. Jones—Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

How Much Will Global Warming Cool Global Growth? by Ishan B. Nath, Valerie A. Ramey, and Peter J. Klenow—UC San Diego

Technology and demand drivers of productivity dynamics in developed and emerging market economies by Alistair Dieppe, Neville Francis, and Gene Kindberg-Hanlon—European Central Bank

Capitalism is in worse shape in Europe by Ruchir Sharma—The Financial Times

The Mother of All Bubbles by Ruchir Sharma—The Financial Times

The Curious Incident of the Elevated Profit Margins by James Montier—GMO

Federal Surplus or Deficit [-] as Percent of Gross Domestic Product - FRED


Euro area government deficit at 3.6% and EU at 3.5% of GDP—eurostat

End of an era: The coming long-run slowdown in corporate profit growth and stock returns by Michael Smolyansky—Federal Reserve Board

Should investors just give up on stocks outside America?—The Economist

Related Episodes

500: The S&P 500 Index and the Decade Ahead

499: What Makes an Economy Prosperous? Spotlight on Cuba and Argentina

343: Why the Productivity Slowdown Could Lead to Lower Living Standards


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works,

0:05.6

how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein.

0:10.6

Today is episode 503. It's titled, U.S. stocks have never been this overhyped.

0:17.7

Yesterday, I pulled up our Asset Camp app. This is our stock and bond market index research

0:24.9

tool. And I wanted to see the updated data and see what was the top performing stock indexes

0:31.2

in November for the 46 stock markets around the world we track. The top seven were U.S. stock indexes, including mid-cap growth,

0:40.9

which was a leading performer. It gained over 12 percent last month. If we compare U.S. stock returns

0:47.5

overall, this would be representative by the S&P 500 index, the topic of episode 500 of money for the rest of us. USA stocks returned

0:58.3

6.2% in November. The rest of the world, excluding U.S., so the MSCI All-Country World

1:05.3

XUS, fell 0.9% in U.S. dollar terms last month. The level of outperformance of the U.S. is astounding.

1:14.6

Year to date, 28% return compared to only 7.6% for all country world X.S. that includes

1:23.2

emerging markets. One year, U.S. stocks have outperformed non-U.S. by 20 percentage points, by almost

1:30.5

eight percentage points over three years, by 10 percentage points over five years, eight percentage

1:37.3

points over 10 years, and five percentage points over 20 years. Why in the world would we ever not

1:43.4

put all of our stock investments in the U.S.

1:46.5

stock market? Well, turns out there are some reasons why, but doing so led to massive underperformance

1:54.6

over the past decade. If we go back to the end of the bear market in March 2009, an investment in an S&P 500 index fund or

2:07.2

ETF would have returned 1,000%. You would have made 10 times your money investing in the S&P,

2:16.1

whereas had you invested outside of the U.S., you would have only returned

2:20.7

two and a half times your money. So a 270% return compared to a thousand percent return

2:27.7

for the S&P 500. Investors in the U.S. are credibly bullish, especially after the U.S. presidential election with perhaps

2:36.2

lower taxes, reduced regulations, tariffs that could benefit U.S. companies compared to the rest of

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