web site that tracks stock market valuations versus GDP for the major
industrial nations.

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Request for Question Clarification by morris-ga on 30 Jun 2002 08:27 PDT

mjw212-ga,

It's an interesting question, but as far as web sites are concerned,
it's something of an apples and oranges mix. Stock market valuation
can be recomputed continuously, while GDP numbers are only estimated
at long intervals, and the "official" numbers are frequently restated
many months after they are released. There is no real-time data for
GDP as there is for stocks, so the one can't actually be tracked
against the other. However, there may be some academic papers or news
articles on the web that graph GDP over the years against the total
market capitalization of a given country, maybe as a bar graph with
one data point per year. Would you be happy with that sort of
information, if it can be found? Unfortunately, you would need to pick
an arbitrary date in the year to get the market cap number, unless
somebody did an "average market cap" for a year, a term I haven't ever
come across.

morris-ga

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Clarification of Question by mjw212-ga on 01 Jul 2002 21:13 PDT

Thank you.  I realize that GDP numbers are updated everyone once in
while, but I would be able to see real time cumulative market cap for
all of the major industrial nations and see how the ratios of market
cap/GDP have trended over time.  The following web site has a cahrt
for the US.  I want charts that are similar but up to the minute and
for the major industrialized nations.

http://www.sscommonsense.org/page04.html#spot03

Rather than try to find exactly the type of website you described, I
looked at a couple websites with international economic data.  One
that looks promising, is the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development ("OECD").  Try:

http://www.oecd.org/EN/document/0,,EN-document-0-nodirectorate-no-1-9066-0,00.html#title6

On this page the files I had in mind are:
Short Term Economic Statistics: Indicators by subject
and
The OECD Hot File

The market caps are expressed as an index (appears to index to 100 at
some point in time).  If you also index the GDP data you may be able
to create the graphs you're seeking.

I know this approach sounds a little labor intensive.  But the other
options I saw were commercial services, such as Global Financial Data,
Inc. (http://www.globalfindata.com/), which appears to offer a 24 hour
access period for about $55.

PS - obviously comparing an index of stock market valuation to an
index of GDP isn't going to help too much with comparisons between
countries - but it will help you look at trends, i.e. countries with
stock prices increasing more rapidly than GDP.

mjw212-ga

The common sense page was very interesting, but if you look closely at
their GDP vs. Market Cap chart, you'll see that they are only updating
each number once a year. I'm afraid the "up to the minute" part of
your question eliminates the possibility of an answer.