On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 08:03:51AM -0700, Nick Arnett wrote: > On the other hand, I have no idea what percentage of the economy is > represented by public companies. Certainly quite a bit, since there are > relatively few very large companies that are closely held. On the other > hand, there's the rather enormous government sector, which is quite > difficult to compare with the private sector, especially in terms of ROI.
Here are some numbers that don't necessarily answer the question, but give some clues: annual GDP of US, as of 2002Q2: $10,376.9 billion Wilshire 5000 "Total Market Index" capitalization (now): $8,373.6 billion US National debt (now): $6,249.7 billion Stock Price to sales ratio ------------------------- WMT 1.05 JNJ 5.02 GE 2.06 MSFT 9.19 XOM 1.20 PFE 5.64 C 2.85 IBM 1.58 AIG 2.85 KO 5.52 Note the Wilshire 5000 is an index that tracks more than 5700 US stocks/companies. I'm not sure what fraction of the public market that represents, but it must be substantial. But the Wilshire number looks like it must be a lot less than the total capitalization of all companies, public and private, since it seems P/S ratios range from 1 to 9 for the biggest companies, and the GDP is greater than the Wilshire 5000 capitalization. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
