Now, some of you smart math folks may be saying to yourself, well, it's probably more about

the GDP cratering in the context of COVID-19 than it is about somehow the stock market going

up so much more.

The problem with that is that using pre-pandemic GDP, the ratio is still 170%, an all-time

high, higher than that March 2000.com bubble peak.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, Bitstamp, and nexo.io, and produced and

distributed by CoinDess. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, August 31st, and today's episode is

sort of a super brief, where I'm going to share a lot of numbers and a lot of stories,

just even more briefly than usual. And the common theme is the stories the stock markets are telling us right now. And I thought that this was a good time for this episode, given that we're

in that classic transition from summer to fall, trying to wrap our heads around everything

going on, looking, I think,

uneasily at what's going to happen with the markets as we go into this election season. So

it should be a pretty interesting way to try to get a sense of just what's out there and what's

happening. Let's start with the number that this episode was named for. Sven Henrik, who's Northman trader on Twitter, tweeted out a chart this morning

showing that the market cap to GDP ratio has reached 184.7%.

That is the ratio of the total market capitalization of U.S. companies to the total GDP.

That 184.7% number compares to around 130% at the start of the year. According to a different tweet from Liz Ann Saunders, who's the

chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, it's actually 190%, with the total market cap of all U.S. stocks hovering just under 37 trillion.

The previous high of 167% was in March of 2000, which was obviously at the peak of the dot-com

bubble, so a precedent that isn't really great. Some of you smart math folks may be saying

...