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.

This post previously appeared in mid-2013, but given the Fed’s ongoing monetary policies over the last few years, and the recent volatility in the currency markets, it makes sense to revisit today.

In my role as chief investment officer at an independent broker/dealer–RIA, I often receive questions from advisors, their clients, and the media about the potential for a dollar collapse and, more important, what currency would replace the dollar in that (in my belief) unlikely event.

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.

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?

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.)

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.