The headline this morning, of course, is yesterday’s stock market decline—a loss of almost 2 percent for the S&P 500 on the heels of a weak December. There’s been a great deal of commentary pointing out that the market dropped both the last day of December and the first day of January, which means . . . what?

Not much, I would argue.

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 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.

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.?

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.

On December 4, I joined John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics, for an interview on Fox Business. The discussion centered on which global markets may be best for investing in 2015, and why I think the greatest risks to the stock markets will come in the first quarter. 

There's been some trepidation recently about the November jobs report. Amid signs of weakness, pullbacks on various stats, and problems in the rest of the world, most forecasters were backing off on their earlier estimates, just in case.

They should have doubled down.

The news is in: Black Friday was a bust. Sales over the Thanksgiving weekend were down 11 percent, with 6 million fewer shoppers this year than last.Sounds like a pretty bleak Christmas, no?

In fact, Black Friday—so named because it’s when retailers get as much as 40 percent of their annual sales, moving from the red into the black—may not be the best bellwether of the holiday shopping season. While lackluster sales aren’t necessarily a good sign, they also don’t spell doom for holiday spending.