We knew we should have added in our Apple the Sovereign post that market cap and cash and investments are stock variables and the GDP data are flow variables,  similar to the variables of balance sheets and those of income statements.   The exercise was to give some  perspective on Apple’s size and maybe should have used Market Cap/GDP as the metric,  but wanted to keep it simple.  Point taken.

By the way,  Bank Assets/GDP ratio has now become a crucial metric in measuring sovereign risk after the European crisis.