China and India for the price of VW

The fun fact of the morning, from Merrill Lynch emerging markets dude Michael Hartnett:

You can buy the entire free float of China and India with today's market cap of Volkswagen, and still have enough spare change to buy Turkey.

With VW's stock price down 42% so far today as the Great Porsche Short Squeeze of 2008 unravels, that may not be true anymore.

But that it was true, if only for a moment, would seem to indicate that, for all the talk about U.S. stocks being cheap, or at least sorta cheap, the biggest bargains are going to turn out to be in emerging markets.