If your business is stocks, the US is all that matters.

As 2025 dawned, the term “equities” had virtually no meaning outside of the US context, which is to say we’re nearing existential thresholds when it comes to the “TINA” narrative and US shares.

I realize this is a bit repetitive by now, but to reiterate, the situation’s nothing short of absurd. As SocGen’s Andrew Lapthorne put it Monday, recapping 2024’s most important themes across global equities, the rest of the world’s “struggl[ing] for relevance.”

“The average market cap of a US stock within the MSCI World is roughly 3.3x higher than non-US stocks,” he wrote. What does that mean, exactly? Well, it means “the average RoW stock would need to deliver over three times the average performance of a US stock to have the same index impact,” Lapthorne marveled.

He called the figure above “quite remarkable.” That’s an understatement. US stocks, Lapthorne said, are “completely and utterly” dominating global benchmark indices.

Note, for example, that the US now comprises nearly three quarters of the MSCI World Developed Market index.

You can, Lapthorne went on, explain the “TINA” dynamic for US shares by way of US macro exceptionalism, but it’s really about valuations.

The figure above, from the same cited note, gives you a sense of the extent to which multiple expansion’s the driving force behind US shares’ conquest of global benchmarks. Note that the black line (the US share of total market cap) is running away from the red line (corporate America’s earnings weight).

There’s some overlap there, of course, which Lapthorne readily acknowledged. Higher valuations, he remarked, can be a product of “future economic expectations.”

Any way you slice it, the US is the only game in town. And as the figures above make clear, it’s increasingly the case that “only game in town” can be taken almost literally in this discussion.