How Big?

The WSJ's MarketBeat Blog has an entry on Brazil overtaking China as the largest emerging market:

Brazil edged past China to become the largest emerging market in the world, as measured by Morgan Stanley Capital International’s emerging markets index. Brazil has a free-float market capitalization of $509.10 billion and comprises 14.95% of the index; China, $481.80 billion and 14.15%, respectively, according to MSCI, FactSet and Citi Investment Research.

That's interesting I suppose, but what really caught my eye was the market cap of these countries. Sometimes I think we forget how big the US market really is compared to some of these emerging markets. As a comparison consider the market cap of some of these US companies:

ExxonMobil $484 Billion
Microsoft $264 Billion
AT&T $215 Billion
GE $343 Billion
Walmart $206 Billion

As a further comparison consider that the market cap of the S&P 500 is roughly $13 Trillion. Yeah, that's a T.