It depends. Finance genuinely helps, there's no doubt about that. But I think there are diminishing returns. A deeper market with a greater variety of lenders

It depends. Finance genuinely helps, there's no doubt about that. But I think there are diminishing returns. A deeper market with a greater variety of lenders always helps, but it's not clear to me that a very large/varied market is much better than a large/varied market. Anecdata: the founders/startups where I live had a lot more bad stories to tell twenty years ago than in the recent past. Just from hearsay in one sector of one city, Silicon Valley has a better financing environment than here today, but even if the graph in the WSJ article shows a bigger gap, the stories I've heard tell about a smaller gap. Maybe that sector has grown to pass a usability threshold here, and the US has grown more without passing a threshold. I wouldn't know and all I have is hearsay, but the hearsay is enough to make the doubt what the WSJ graph really shows. I realise that there are fields where the US has no peer. If you want to finance a takeover as big as Twitter, then you really need big debt markets, and the US has by far the biggest. I feel, intuitively, that that may not be well connected to the greater economy or the health of median companies, though.