Why the stockmarket is disappearing

The law of supply and demand is one of the first things that students of economics learn. When the price of something goes up, producers bring more to market. What, then, is going on in global stockmarkets?

Global share prices have never been higher, having risen by 14% over the past year. At the same time, the supply of stocks is shrinking. As analysts at JPMorgan Chase, a bank, note, the pace of company listings is slower this year than last, and last year was already a slow one. This means that equity issuance net of stock buy-backs so far this year is already negative, at minus $120bn—the lowest such figure since at least 1999. Companies including ByteDance, OpenAI, Stripe and SpaceX have valuations in the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars, and remain private.