[lbo-talk] Looking for statistics on Speculative versus RealStock investment (?)

[SA]

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Mar 24, 2009, at 5:19 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> Yeah, I'd like to know too. It's often easy to overlook how small the 
>> "visible" publicly-traded universe of companies is relative to the 
>> total economy. There are about 6,400 companies in the Wilshire 5000 
>> and I think about 10,000 in Compustat, and many of these aren't what 
>> you'd call real companies. But in total there are more than 5 million 
>> firms in the US. In 2002 there were almost 17,000 firms with more 
>> than 500 employees. Probably well under half the workforce works for 
>> a listed company.
>
> But man, do they ever account for a disproportionate share of output.

Well, I don't know about that. The best proxy for value added is total 
payroll, which makes up probably at least three quarters of total value 
added. The roughly 6,000 largest firms in the U.S. (by employment size) 
accounted for only 48% of total private-sector payroll in 2001, the most 
recent data year:  http://www.census.gov/epcd/susb/2001/us/US--.HTM 

And since the universe of public companies doesn't coincide perfectly 
with the biggest 6,000 firms, the real number is actually lower.

SA