U.S. leads the world in 2013 market capitalization growth

With high seemingly intractable problematic unemployment levels, slow GDP growth, huge national debt, and an embarrassingly  inept government, it might seem surprising to find that the U.S. leads the nations with the highest overall  market capitalizations in market cap growth so far this year.  That's in a report from the respected research firm Bespoke.

The U.S. market cap growth thus far in 2013 is 2%, Japan comes in second at 1%, Thailand, Indonesia, Switzerland and China all have rises of around .5 %,  eight nations are roughly flat and 23 are down.  As an unneeded reminder these are just growth rates for 2013 to date for publicly traded companies.   For reference, the nations with the highest total nominal market caps are the U.S. at 34%, Japan at 8%, China, Hong Kong, and the U.K. at 6%, and Germany and France at 3%.   In my estimation and intuition,  these numbers and growth rates do not include privately owned companies or nationalized enterprises, as well as substantial off the books activity in many countries including the U.S., and if that's right, these numbers are to some extent meaningless. Nevertheless, they do show some resiliance here by U.S. public companies despite our government's every effort to make regulations more unpredictable, more opaque, and corporations less respected.

These are just current numbers, just numbers, and do not equate to qualilty of life, the outlook for the future, and country competencies(these may well be the most meaningful inputs if such things could be measured).  It still was interesting to see the U.S. as the leader in 2013 market cap growth, and to think what that means for the state of the world economy.  The "Great Recession" still looms over the world.