A visual essay · 1881—2026
How capitalism changed in eight charts
Over a century, the market economy became a balance-sheet economy: assets grew relative to incomes, debt grew relative to output, and falling interest rates rewrote the price of time.
Read the evidence ↓The thesis
Capitalism did not stop producing things. But the route to wealth shifted: owning, financing and repricing assets became more consequential relative to earning income from production.
The claim is not that every rise is a bubble, or that debt is inherently bad. The claim is narrower: valuations, leverage and ownership now carry more macroeconomic weight.
This is primarily a U.S. story because the longest comparable series are American. The mechanisms—lower discount rates, credit expansion and concentrated asset ownership—extend across many advanced economies.
01 · PRICE
CAPE smooths a decade of inflation-adjusted earnings. It cannot time a crash, but it makes the repricing of corporate claims unmistakable: the market now spends long stretches at levels once reserved for rare manias.
Monthly observations shown as annual averages; the final point is the latest available month.
02 · BALANCE SHEETS
A larger stock of assets sits above each dollar of annual disposable income. That is prosperity for asset owners—but it also means the economy is more sensitive to valuations, interest rates and who already owns the balance sheet.
Household and nonprofit net worth divided by disposable personal income; year-end observations.
03 · PROPERTY
Housing became an investment asset as well as shelter. The median new-home price has pulled away from the median household’s annual income, especially after the global financial crisis.
Annual average of quarterly new-home prices divided by nominal median household income. Mix and quality of new homes change over time.
04 · THE PRICE OF MONEY
From the early 1980s to 2020, the discount rate fell almost continuously. Lower yields mechanically raise the present value of distant cash flows and made leverage easier to carry—even though rates have since rebounded.
Annual average of daily 10-year constant-maturity Treasury yields; nominal, not inflation-adjusted.
05 · LEVERAGE
Households and businesses can bring future spending forward through credit. The stock of private non-financial debt is now roughly one-and-a-half years of national output—a deeper dependence on refinancing conditions.
BIS total credit to the U.S. private non-financial sector, adjusted for breaks; last quarterly observation in each year.
06 · THE STATE
The Second World War peak once looked exceptional. Debt fell for three decades, then climbed through tax choices, ageing, recessions, wars, the financial crisis and the pandemic. Cheap funding softened the constraint; it did not erase it.
Gross federal debt held by the public as a share of annual GDP.
07 · PRODUCTION
This BLS index is not a percentage of GDP. It tracks labor compensation relative to nonfarm business output. Its long decline says that the gains from production have tilted away from workers as a group.
Quarterly BLS labor-share index shown as annual averages. An index of 95 is not a 95% labor share.
08 · OWNERSHIP
Asset inflation is distributional. The top one per cent own a rising share of net worth—and an even larger share of equities—so the same market rally produces radically different household outcomes.
Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts; annual average of quarterly estimates.
What changed?
The distortion is not one statistic. It is the feedback loop between all four.
Method & sources
Each line uses the longest defensible series for the question. Annual averages reduce noise. No axes are truncated to exaggerate small changes; hover or touch any chart for exact values.