These three things

by Doug Brodie

The internet can be a wonderful thing, and we think that the site at visualcapitalist.com has some interesting compilations of statistics. Here’s one that sticks out: if you’ve ever wondered if the French really are the work-shy-gilets-jaunes who retire as soon as they’ve learned to grow vines in the garden, well, apparently they are not the European champions.

I once spent four years working in Saudi Arabia. I can’t remember being told about the ridiculous retirement age, which is just as well as there were no pensions over there back in the day (though we did have Allied Dunbar salesmen flying in regularly, on the prowl).

There’s another fascinating visual they produce, which makes it easy to see where all the money is in the world, and perhaps why the post-Brexit London stock exchange is struggling to attract companies to list here.

Back when I was a trainee, going from classroom to classroom ploughing through exams, we were taught that as a rule of thumb, the main markets were the US, UK, and Japan, with minor markets in Europe. It's interesting to see the uber-inflation that has happened from the US tech and media stocks, how Japan has now been dwarfed, and that the UK has severely dwindled in global importance, being roughly the same size as the Canadian market.

Q: What is the Canadian stock market called?

A: Look it up on Google.

Interestingly, I was following an argument in the FT the other day and came across a very informative set of data from the World Food Programme that counter-balances the chart above showing how dominant the US market is; total contributions to the WFP in 2022 were $14.1 billion. The biggest donor by a factor of 4 was the US at $7.2bn, four times more than the next largest being Germany at $1.7bn. Note, China only comes in at 44 in the table with just $11.9m, which is less than Ukraine (!) at $14.8m. I don’t know why but Chad donated $23m, twice that of China.

As they used to say in the original Hard Rock…love all, serve all.