The US equity market closed 2024 at roughly $62 trillion in total market capitalisation. The US bond market sat at about $58 trillion in outstanding instruments. Together those two pools represent more than half of global capital markets activity, and they remain the central anchor of the world’s financial system despite three decades of growth in international competitors.
The SIFMA 2025 Capital Markets Fact Book documents the scale, growth rates, and trading depth that hold this position together. The numbers confirm what most market practitioners already feel: US capital markets remain unusually deep, unusually liquid, and unusually integrated with the rest of the economy compared to any other developed-market peer, and that depth has tangible consequences for everyone from founders building fintech infrastructure to allocators thinking about long-duration positioning.
The article that follows reads the SIFMA data forward. It lays out the actual scale of the equity and fixed-income pools, explains why every category posted double-digit growth in 2024, examines what trading volumes confirm about market depth, sets out the funding role capital markets play for the US economy, looks at the securities industry employment story, and closes on the implications for fintech infrastructure builders working anywhere near these markets.
The scale of US equity and fixed-income markets
US equities at $62 trillion represent roughly 45 percent of global equity market capitalisation. The next-largest national equity market (Japan or China depending on quarter) sits below $7 trillion, an order of magnitude smaller. The US lead reflects the depth of US public-company listings, the size of the largest US firms (the top ten US companies alone account for roughly $20 trillion of market cap), and the breadth of retail and institutional participation that supports continuous price discovery across exchanges and alternative venues.
The US bond market at $58 trillion is similarly dominant. Treasury debt outstanding at the end of 2024 sat at roughly $28 trillion, mortgage-backed securities at about $12.5 trillion, corporate bonds at $11 trillion, and municipal bonds at around $4.2 trillion. Add agency debt, asset-backed securities, and money-market instruments and the total approaches $58 trillion. The Treasury market alone is the world’s deepest sovereign debt market by a wide margin, and it is the instrument against which most other global fixed-income pricing benchmarks itself.
US equity and bond markets at $62T and $58T respectively still anchor the world’s largest capital pools.Why every category posted double-digit growth in 2024, and what trading volumes confirm
SIFMA’s 2024 data shows roughly 14 percent equity-market-cap growth, 11 percent bond-market growth, and double-digit growth in nearly every supporting category. Three drivers explain that consistency across an unusually broad set of instruments. The first is sustained corporate earnings growth, which lifted equity valuations against backdrop interest-rate expectations that supported multiple expansion. The second is sustained Treasury issuance to fund US fiscal deficits, which mechanically expanded the bond pool. The third is corporate refinancing activity that took advantage of selected windows of favourable rates to extend duration and increase outstanding stocks.
Trading volumes confirm the depth that those scale numbers imply. US equity turnover in 2024 averaged roughly $700 billion per day across NYSE, Nasdaq, and the major alternative venues. Treasury secondary trading averaged about $850 billion per day. Corporate bond trading averaged about $40 billion per day. Those volumes mean any institutional participant can move size without meaningful market impact, which is the structural advantage US markets offer that no peer market can match. Liquidity at that scale is the single most reliable competitive moat the US financial system has, and it is the reason foreign investors continue to net-allocate to US assets through every market cycle even when domestic fundamentals are mixed.
The role of capital markets in funding the US economy
Capital markets fund a meaningfully larger share of US economic activity than they do for most peer economies. Roughly 75 percent of non-financial corporate borrowing in the US runs through the bond market or commercial paper market rather than through bank lending. In Europe and most of Asia, that ratio is closer to 50 percent or below. The result is that US firms operate with deeper, more diversified, and typically cheaper sources of capital than their global peers, and that funding advantage flows through into investment levels, R&D intensity, and labour productivity over time.
Equity markets play a similarly outsized role. US public equity markets host roughly 4,000 listed companies with combined market cap larger than every other national equity market combined. The IPO market, while volatile cyclically, still produces the largest annual flow of new public listings of any country in the world. That listing depth is what gives US fintech and software companies their preferred path to scale, and it is the exit pathway that absorbs most of the late-stage venture investment that lands in the country. The feedback loop between deep public markets and active private capital is one of the under-discussed structural advantages the US economy still enjoys.
The securities industry employment story
The US securities industry employed roughly 1 million people directly in 2024, with an additional 2 to 3 million people supporting it indirectly through technology, legal, audit, and administrative services. Those direct securities-industry jobs concentrate in New York (about 200,000), with smaller but meaningful concentrations in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Charlotte.
The interesting employment trend underneath the headline number is the shift in role mix. Traditional sales and trading roles have shrunk by roughly 25 percent since 2010, while quantitative, technology, and risk-management roles have grown by roughly 60 percent over the same period. The total employment number is now stable to slightly growing year over year, but the underlying composition has changed dramatically. The implication for talent flow is that securities-industry compensation now competes directly with technology-industry compensation for the same kinds of engineers and quantitative researchers, and the firms that have built credible technology cultures inside trading and asset-management businesses are the ones now winning recruiting battles against pure-play software peers.
What founders, investors, and fintech infrastructure builders should take from the data
For founders building fintech infrastructure that touches capital markets, the practical lesson is that the depth of US markets is both the opportunity and the competitive moat to plan around. Trade execution, custody, settlement, post-trade analytics, and risk management are all enormous addressable markets, but they are also markets where existing infrastructure is well-capitalised, deeply embedded, and unusually difficult to displace. The right entry strategy is to build alongside incumbent infrastructure rather than against it, and to target categories where the incumbents are demonstrably underinvesting in modernisation.
For investors, the lesson is that US capital markets remain a defensible long-duration allocation regardless of cycle. The combination of depth, liquidity, and institutional infrastructure means that even mediocre US-listed companies trade at higher liquidity premia than excellent companies in shallower markets. That structural premium is unlikely to compress meaningfully over the next decade, and portfolio construction that under-weights US public markets typically gives up risk-adjusted return that the rest of the portfolio cannot make up.
The capital-markets fintech segment specifically is also where regulatory technology investment is concentrating in 2025-2026. Trade reporting, transaction-cost analytics, and best-execution monitoring are all categories where compliance pressure is creating commercial pull, and the operators building credible regtech platforms in this space are increasingly the targets of incumbent acquirers looking to upgrade their own internal capabilities without the build-time penalty.
For the fintech infrastructure category specifically, open innovation patterns playing out across US finance increasingly read into capital-markets infrastructure, where the same partnership dynamics that reshaped consumer payments and lending are now reshaping execution venues, custody platforms, and post-trade processing. The operators paying attention to that pattern early are the ones positioning to lead the next decade of capital-markets infrastructure innovation, and the ones treating capital-markets technology as a separate game from broader fintech are the ones most likely to be displaced.
