From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2007 - 16:14:39 EDT
In a previous post, I mentioned that the IMF estimates "US marketable financial assets" at $46 trillion at the moment. How does this estimate compare with the estimate for the value of US physical assets? From http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/spec.pdf (2005 figures, Table 13-4 National Wealth) I can get an estimate of the total value of the stock of physical assets, as follows: public physical capital $8.5 trillion private physical capital $47.0 trillion total physical assets $55.5 trillion (this includes the value of land) The "national wealth" table adds the following items, and then totals the assets: education capital $48.1 trillion R&D capital $3.3 trillion total capital assets $106.9 trillion net foreign claims $5.5 trillion net wealth $101.4 trillion These are 2005 figures. Extrapolating these figures linearly to 2007, using a ten-year average annual growth rate and adjusting for the CPI (I don't have an capital expenditure index to hand), I get: public physical capital $9.2 trillion private physical capital $54.2 trillion total physical assets $63.4 trillion education capital $55.8 trillion R&D capital $3.8 trillion total capital assets $122.9 trillion net foreign claims $6.7 trillion net wealth $116.2 trillion Then you would be inclined to think that for every $10 of physical assets existing in the US economy today, there exists about $7 of "marketable financial assets" (i.e. tradeable financial claims). Of course, I do not know how accurate the Budget estimates of physical asset values are. Jurriaan
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