Who Owns All the Stocks & Bonds?

Jesse Livermore once said, “Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”

In other words, humans are the one constant in the markets and human nature doesn’t change.

But markets do change and which humans control the assets involved in the markets has changed considerably over time.

Goldman Sachs recently shared some excellent data on how the ownership of stocks and bonds has evolved over the years. First up, this shows the composition of who owns the debt of the U.S. government: