NEW YORK, Aug. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Egan-Jones released an analysis examining how dependent the American economy has become on finance, and why that dependence leaves it exposed if the world’s financial center of gravity moves as it has before.
Finance and insurance generated 2.8 percent of US gross domestic product in 1950 and roughly 8 percent today, while the sector’s share of domestic corporate profits peaked near 38 percent in 2002. Talent followed: finance drew 21 percent of Harvard seniors entering the workforce in the Class of 2025, the largest single destination, on a 195 percent pay premium.
The vulnerability is mobility. A firm can manage a billion dollars with nearly the staff it needs for a hundred million, and assets leave as easily as they arrive, as the rapid deposit flight at Silicon Valley Bank showed.
History supplies the pattern. Amsterdam’s exchange grew out of a trading empire, London’s institutions followed naval and industrial supremacy, and New York’s rise came more than a century after America first led in farming and then manufacturing. Financial leadership arrived after real economic power in each case, and receded with it.
Trade has already moved. In 2000, 33 countries traded more with China than with the United States; today 151 do, against 57. Egan-Jones also points to the renminbi settling most of China’s cross-border transactions and to Deutsche Bank’s appointment by the People’s Bank of China as a renminbi clearing bank.
Capital has not followed. The S&P 500 has quintupled since the eve of the financial crisis while the Shanghai Composite sits below its 2007 peak, an advantage attributed to US innovation, capital depth, demographics, and dollar primacy. Taiwan is identified as the point where that balance could reprice quickly if Beijing grows impatient, with announced US Navy transits of the strait down from a trailing-twelve-month peak of 16 in 2021 to 2.
America’s position does not disappear in this account. Egan-Jones instead offers markers for institutional investors and risk managers: the renminbi’s share of trade finance, foreign participation at Treasury auctions, and alternatives to SWIFT, framed as a way to recognize a shift in financial gravity early enough to matter for raising and deploying capital.
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SOURCE Egan-Jones Ratings Co.
