Before we say anything else, here is a simple comparison.

India accounts for roughly 4% of global stock market capitalisation. The United States accounts for roughly 50%.

That means if you lined up all the listed companies in the world by their total market value, one in every two rupees of that value would belong to a company headquartered in the United States.

Now, here is what makes that number interesting.

The US has about 4% of the world’s population. It accounts for about 25% of global GDP. And yet it holds 48% of the global market cap.

That gap, between what the US represents economically and what it represents in markets, is not an accident. It is the result of something specific that happened over the last few decades. We will get to that.

But first, let us put things in historical context, because it was not always this way.