Market caps are roughly expected future earnings, discounted back to give some net present value. They're expectations about the profitability of businesses, with expected profits accumulated over forecasts decades into the future. Market caps ignore privately held businesses, small businesses, state owned businesses & economic activity, economic output that might be happening at a household level, etc.

GDP is some peculiar measure of a country's economic output, over one year. It doesn't care if the economic activity is profitable or not & it doesn't care if the surplus of the economic activity is extracted by public companies or not. It's not forward-looking & based on expectations.

all that said, ggm has a fair point that individual investors & retirees with share portfolios directly benefit from the profits of companies whose economic activities may not be particularly pro-social & beneficial to the world. it's similar for climate change -- easy to point the finger at the energy producer, the big dirty brown coal plant. harder to point the finger at the demand side of the same equation - much of which is household demand. but both the individual end consumer households and the energy producer & everyone else involved in the value chain benefit out of the trade, even if the trade is net-negative for the world if we were to properly account for the externalities (e.g. polluting the atmosphere with CO_2 pushes the costs to everyone on the planet, current & future generations, not just the folks benefiting from the trade).

Maybe gold was already cheap. Maybe a gold coin was as silver to you and I.

I think I'll have Claude do a deep dive and research into this report, then release a paper on it.

(This goes under the theory of 'the more capacity you have, the more capacity is used' concept, and so, within a few years, we'll have 100 page reports on musings like this, instead of a two or three line post)

If anything prices are being kept artificially _low_ by the US withdrawing from the strategic petroleum reserve, and similar (unquantified) actions being taken by the Chinese government. We'll have to see how the situation changes after the US midterms.

I find it also hard to read it that way when I look at that "Price in February -> Price in April" annotation: if those two points on the y-axis mark points in time, then so do the correlating points on the x-axis. I can only read that as "from February to April, the demand went up while the prices went down".