Why the World Is Still Investing in America

The world is not selling America short, even if Americans sometimes do.

After spending much of the past few months traveling from Europe to India to China, I’ve been struck by the disconnect between how many Americans talk about our country’s financial system and how clients around the world describe it to me. At home, the conversation often focuses on volatility, dysfunction, and decline. Abroad, governments, companies, and investors are still working out how to gain greater access to what America has built. 

The data reinforces this. The U.S. has been capturing a growing share of global direct investment, rising from 15% prior to the pandemic to 20% on average, beginning in 2024 and continuing through this year. Today the U.S. equity market makes up nearly 65% of global market capitalization. 

The same is true of the dollar. For all the talk of de-dollarization, the broad dollar index remains near its 40-year high. Shortly after last year’s tariff announcements, the Bank for International Settlements' survey of central banks around the world showed that roughly 90% of transactions remained dollar-based.

These numbers do not mean that America’s position is guaranteed. They show that, despite the turbulence of recent years, the gravitational pull of the American financial system remains dominant. This advantage matters when the defining economic question of the next decade may not be who invents the future, but who finances it. 

Building the next generation of AI infrastructure, expanding energy capabilities, and reshoring manufacturing will all depend on the ability to mobilize capital at scale. And nowhere else in the world can private capital move as quickly and at greater scale than it does here.  

The strength of American markets is also a reflection of investors’ willingness to finance tomorrow’s economy. The S&P 500 is often treated as a mirror of the U.S. economy, but it is also a window into the companies and technologies investors believe will drive future earnings and growth.

That willingness to back the future extends well beyond the largest public companies. The U.S. has the largest share of startups in the world and American companies capture 64% of global startup funding.  

This economic ecosystem should empower Americans. Here, an entrepreneur with an idea can open an account at a community bank, raise seed capital from a venture fund, and eventually go public on the world’s largest equity market.  Here, a small startup can become a truly global company. And tens of millions of Americans can then participate in that success through retirement funds and personal investments.

This integrated system helps people build businesses, purchase homes, create wealth, and invest in their futures. It also gives America the capacity to build at home and asserts its influence abroad. From the Marshall Plan to the modern global economy, America’s financial strength has repeatedly amplified American leadership.

Yet scale and innovation alone do not explain America’s advantage. Our financial system rests on public and private institutions that have been tested and strengthened over generations, markets backed by millions of individual investors and the world’s most competitive banking sector.

Trust in this system is one reason the dollar remains central to global commerce. It helps explain why global trade, payments and investment continue to flow through the system, and why investors seek the safety, liquidity and transparency of American markets through crises and economic shocks. 

None of this means America’s financial system is perfect. Over the decades, Americans have lived through periods that damaged confidence in banks and markets. America’s financial institutions have made significant changes and built back trust, but those of us who lead them have an obligation to keep earning it.  

Perhaps the most distinctive advantage of the American model is not that it avoids failure, but its ability to adapt, reform, and continue creating opportunity. The same country that built the world’s deepest capital markets has repeatedly renewed them through innovation, competition and change. American companies of all sizes have confronted a number of shocks in recent years, yet they continue to adapt, innovate and grow. 

That is why it is never a good idea to bet against the American entrepreneur. It is also a major reason why, like so many immigrants before and after me, I chose America, and why the world’s capital continues to choose America too.

The truth is that if another country could take Wall Street off America’s hands tomorrow, it would in a heartbeat.

Reporting from TIME contributed to this story.