Europe just got quite a bit more uncertain. The election in Greece over the weekend brought to power the Syriza party, which has vowed to challenge the existing Greek financial bailout, an implicit threat to the current economic consensus throughout Europe.

The top story yesterday, at least in financial and investing circles, was the European Central Bank's decision to launch its own version of quantitative easing (QE). In short, the central bank will buy bonds in order to force down interest rates and encourage business investment and consumer spending.

I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about 2014 portfolio performance. Investors are reviewing their results, comparing them with the performance of U.S. stocks, and asking the question in the headline: Why did my investments do badly last year?

Now that we've looked at China and Europe, it’s time to examine Japan’s economic future.

Today, we’ll continue the “outside view” series on international investing with a look at the eurozone.

Ever since Christmas, the stock market has been trending downward, with the slide getting worse over the past week or so.

As I’ve mentioned multiple times, I generally don’t start to pay attention until we hit the 200-day moving average (which is now at around 1,966 for the S&P 500). But a couple of things have caught my notice lately.

Let’s take the factors we discussed yesterday and apply them to the countries that matter, starting with China.

The largest economy outside the U.S., China is approaching several challenges, the most urgent of which is the need to shift economic growth away from infrastructure and investment and toward consumption. Let’s examine the data and see what an outside view suggests for investors.

Now that we’ve determined which countries are globally relevant, from an economic point of view, we need to decide which factors really matter in how those countries will fare over the next five years.

Building on yesterday’s post, today we’ll start to look at what a global perspective means in an investment context. Of course, I know perfectly well that all countries matter; what I’m getting at in the headline is “Which countries are economically significant on a global scale?”

This week, I'm at Commonwealth’s Chairman’s Retreat in Miami, a place that quickly reminds you that the world is much bigger than the U.S. As it happens, my talk here will focus on the rest of the world—and how, exactly, the U.S. fits into it.