Here's a post that originally appeared in 2013 but is worth revisiting. 

In my recent post on the relative strength and weakness of various currencies, I didn't address one big question: what determines a currency's value? Is there, in fact, a “right answer” as to the value of each currency?

As with many economic questions, there are several right answers, depending on how you look at it.

As 2014 draws to a close, it's time for my traditional Christmas post. Best wishes to you and yours this holiday.

I have always loved Christmas. But as I grew older, I seemed to lose much of the spirit. Now that I have a six-year-old son—who is wrestling with the stress of being good under the eye of the “Elf on the Shelf,” guessing about presents under the tree, and baking cookies with his mom—I find myself recovering much of the Christmas spirit I had lost.

The holidays are always a good time to reflect on the many things we have to be grateful for. As we settle in for a family celebration, here’s my list.

Learn why I told CNBC Worldwide Exchange that I think there’s going to be an accelerated economic recovery in an interview today, December 23. 

As I’ve written before, the doomsayers have been pretty comprehensively wrong, at least in terms of their dire predictions for the U.S. While they may yet be right elsewhere in the world, I thought we’d do a premortem on their behalf to figure out how they might get it wrong for the global economy, too.

What if everything turns out just fine?

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.