US household assets are fairly well distributed between real-estate and equity markets. China for example previously had ~70% of its household wealth tied up in real-estate, which has suffered enormous declines over the past four or five years.

That said, there's no question that US households have grown fat on the massive expansion of the tech giants. A one trillion $ market cap was shocking not long ago, now you've got Apple and Nvidia at $4-$5 trillion, each about as valuable as China's top 25-30 stocks combined. The US wealth base is highly exposed to a PE multiple compression event, which is likely whenever the bubbly valuations centered around the AI boom reduce.

Also to put a reference figure on it, China's top 500 stocks are roughly worth $11.5 trillion. Nvidia + Apple are worth a combined ~$9.6 trillion.

Auatralians are a great case study. Once you control for pensions and similar indirect exposure, Australians have very high stock market exposure.

Indeed. It's so much bigger (in notional terms) than the underlying stock market that you can manipulate it by making large bets in the derivatives market, then move the underlying cash markets with much smaller bets, and collect profit.

That is what Jane Street (IIRC) was accused of. Some of its traders then went to another hedge fund and did the same trick there, reducing Jane Street's profit, and ended up being sued by Jane Street. (BTW, Jane Street claims it was not manipulation, but basis trade arbitrage.)

Of course, 9 out of 10 gambler end up in the red.

Don't get caught up on the geography.

> It is also used despite many developed countries or regions not being culturally Western (e.g. Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao)

It's a USA colony so yes