As I discussed yesterday, the ongoing realignment of many countries is driven fundamentally by economics, rather than by geopolitics, but that doesn’t mean the realignment is geopolitically unimportant. Quite the contrary: What we see here is an accelerating trend that is reinforcing the predominance of the U.S. in the global system, with each piece of the puzzle supporting the others. Cuba is a perfect example.

I’d planned to write about how Russia can respond to its current crisis, and I will. But the announcement that the U.S. and Cuba are resuming normal diplomatic relations has kind of gotten in the way.

Thinking about it, though, the events in Russia and Cuba are, in many ways, different facets of the same story.

As the Russian currency crisis grows and threatens to expand to other emerging and commodity-based markets, I’ve been thinking about how this might play out on a country-by-country basis—not so much here in the U.S., but around the world. (As I’ve written before, I think the U.S. is pretty well insulated in the medium term and longer, despite any short-term shocks.)

There are three major factors I think we need to look at when we consider the economic risk level of a country as a whole.

On the heels of our premortem of the stock market in 2015, let's take a look at the market turbulence we experienced last week and yesterday.

The short version? There’s nothing to worry about yet.

Following up on last week’s post about the value of premortems, I thought I’d do one on the stock market for the coming year. We’ll imagine that a decline has happened and try to figure out how and why, with the goal of strengthening our positioning today.

One of my favorite takeaways from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is the idea of the premortem—that is, looking at a new or proposed project, assuming it has failed, and projecting why that happened. (It's a more proactive version of the postmortem, where you look at actual failures and try to figure out what went wrong.)

As I wrote the other day, the U.S. stands to benefit considerably from cheap oil. The question now is who will suffer—and what might that mean for the U.S.?

I’m working on two things right now: my economic and market outlook for 2015, and an update on the international economic scene that I’ll present at Commonwealth’s top-producer conferences.

The problem I’m facing with both, I realize, is that the world has really changed in the past couple of years, and the recent past is no longer a good guide to the future.

The short answer to that question is no. There is some downside to falling oil prices. But I’d take a 90-percent upside with a 10-percent downside any day of the week.

Newspaper reporters (and bloggers!) are breathing a sigh of relief as the new Congress gets closer. Just as the economic worries are subsiding—at least here in the U.S.—political risks can move back to the front page. As someone who writes a blog post every day, all I can say is thank goodness.

As a citizen, though, I am somewhat (but not yet very) concerned.