so much for my "BRIC" firewall

Between 2006 and the early part of this year I have been diligently building up an investment portfolio based on BRIC stocks. I had thought, perhaps a bit naively, that by investing overseas I can insulate myself from the turmoils on the US stock market. Well, guess what, the so-called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) that were responsible for the near-collapse of the US financial market were also used to finance oversea investments in Russia and South America, and so my holdings in these regions are in as deep of a hole as their US counterpart.