Emerging markets versus developed markets

I recently updated the world market capitalizations by looking at the equities, local bonds, international bonds in the developed and emerging/frontier markets, as well as the market capitalizations as a % of regional (nominal) GDP.  This gives us a big picture view of the investable universe of securities (commodities and currencies are excluded for now).

My observations:

• Developed countries have 88% of total marketable debt in the world but have only 63% share of world GDP, in contrast to emerging/frontier countries which have 12% of marketable debt but 33% of world GDP. Developed countries on the other hand represent 72% of world equity markets, while Emerging Markets, 28%. 
• Developed market total marketable debt/GDP is 193% vs. emerging/frontier markets of 52%.
• Both Emerging Market EMEA (Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa) and EM Latin equities as % of total and debt as % of total are smaller than their world GDP share; which means the potential for both equities and debt for these regions to do well. EM Asia's equities as % of total is the same as its world GDP share though its debt as % of total is only at 7% compared to 17% of GDP share.

(please double-click to enlarge)

So where would you rather invest for the long-run?

Organizational structure of 6 big high-tech companies in cartoon

This is simply my favorite chart of the year which has been re-tweeted by many in the past week.  Manu Cornet, the engineer behind the Gmail themes drew these organizational charts of the Big 6 high-tech companies in the U.S. in the Bonkers World blog.  Many comments on the charts came from people who are working and have worked in those companies.  The charts are so funny because they depict pretty well the true picture.  A few persons commented the legal department of Oracle is not large enough; at Google, essentially no one knows who is doing what and most of what they are doing is a company secret anyway.  A question comes, what if the red dot (read "Steve Jobs", "God") is gone?  And there is still one sane company around: Amazon.  What if the author draws a picture of the structure of the U.S. Government, that would be fun to see.