Enhanced thinking on overseas investing

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get my portfolio the necessary overseas/developing country exposure right from the the start when I started taking investing seriously. However, my thinking was limited to buying into country-specific funds and Vanguard Emerging Market ETF -VWO.

Around the same time, being overwhelmed with news and information about the United States economy, I understood the need to be invested in large-caps through out 2007 as it was obvious that they will be out-performing the small-caps over the new couple of years at least.

However, it seems I limited my thinking about overseas investing by exposing myself to too much risk in the form of what I owned (IIF and VWO). Luckily, the fast growing emerging markets prevented embarrassment. The US economy lags behind significantly this year in growth compared to other markets:

Country2007 growth
China	11.5%
India	8.9
Russia	7.0
Middle East	5.9
Central/Eastern Europe	5.8
Brazil	4.4
United Kingdom	3.1
Mexico	2.9
Euro area	2.5
United States	1.9

However, I could have done a better job of not only benefiting from overseas exposure, but even achieving a more balanced portfolio had I thought about things a little more. Large US companies have a significant exposure to foreign markets. On an average, the S&P 500 companies get approximately 50% of their revenue from goods that are made or sold overseas.
Also more recently, the falling dollar I suppose helps too in making the American goods more cost-competitive internationally. Intel (which is one of the only 2 out-and-out stocks that I own, part of a very badly managed and tiny Roth-IRA), Coca Cola, McDonald's, Exxon Mobil just to new a few HUGE companies have close to 70% of their revenues from overseas.

So, owning a large-cap U.S. growth ETF or an S&P 500 ETF, you might have provided me with all the multinationals I would need, while at the same time moving me a lot more steps closer to a balanced portfolio.

Well, lesson learned! It seems investing is like a practice. At least it is for me.

The question that bothers me however is that if all of these large-caps have so much overseas exposure AND I would think large-caps make up a significant part of the entire US economy, wouldn't all that growth in other countries in turn reflect in growth in these companies and onto the growth number of US economy itself? hmmm......