Margin loans may finance only 1.5% of the value of the New York Stock Exchange but prices are set by those in the market on a given day, among whom the margin men are concentrated.
Historically, the U.S. margin of advantage in earnings per worker has been so large that it has allowed us to finance higher amounts of per capita spending on health care than our peers even while retaining an advantage over them in terms of the amount of residual non-health spending per capita we have left to spend on everything else.