American equities on the 155-year record: the S&P composite from January 1871, where real prices are 64 times their starting level and real total return — the same index with dividends reinvested — is 43,768 times, a gap that is the difference between the 1929 crash taking twenty-nine years to recover and taking seven; the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio at 40.6 in September 2026 against a 145-year median of 16.6, a level exceeded in only twenty months since 1881, seventeen of them in 1999 and 2000; every real total-return fall of 20% or more since 1871, fifteen of them, with how long each took to come back; a dividend yield that averaged 5.32% before 1950 and 1.15% so far in 2026, the lowest in the record; who actually holds it, with the top 1% of households holding 50.1% of all household equities and the bottom half holding 1.1% while 62% of American adults report owning some stock through a 401(k) or IRA; and a market worth 224% of GDP that contains 3,908 listed companies against 8,090 in 1996. Distinct from The Federal Reserve, which sets the price of money rather than the price of assets, and from The National Debt and Wealth & Income Inequality.
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