The World Hasn't Come To An End

Fear not

There have been no new cases of Ebola in the US. It appears to be just as difficult to transmit as the experts told us.

It looks like Kobani is turning into ISIS' Stalingrad. Thanks to stepped-up American air power and the grit and determination of the Kurds, ISIS might be stalled there. Neither they nor their colleagues in Al Qaeda have figured out the value in going after the soft American infrastructure like power and water.

Russia is content for now with digesting Eastern Ukraine. There's a limit to what you can do with only a handful of combat-ready brigades. You may have a bigger army than your neighbors, but if you're going to launch Barbarossa, you need the Wehrmacht. Russia ain't got it.

The recent US stock market decline was just that, a decline and not a crash. The American Fascist Party, err, Democrats, have strangled the US economy with regulations, but it's a slow asphyxiation, not an ISIS-style beheading. We're not in crisis, we're just stagnating.

Despite what people like me say about President Obama and the wild predictions we make, the world hasn't come to an end.

And yet...

I'm still betting on Japan to be the crisis point of the decade. They continue to find ways to wriggle off the hook and live a few more months, but their doom is out there, circling like a shark in the form of mountains and mountains of debt.

Me, I'm doomed, too. Doomed to mix metaphors. Fishing, sharks, mountains. Oh yeah. Those went together real well.

One year in the Nikkei. Look at it wriggle off the mountains and avoid the fishing sharks!