So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up.

It seems, however, that the euphoria was short lived. Yields on Spanish and Italian government bonds have been inching up again, and equity investors mood is souring.

In neighboring Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff s administration made little effort to hide its preference for Macri s opponent. As her government plumbs record lows in opinion polls, the centrist opposition has been inching toward power.

Now that Burundi, after more than a decade of civil war, is inching towards recovery, it is important that the truth about past atrocities be revealed and that the perpetrators be brought to justice.

The good news is that the Fed increasingly seems to be taking this point on board and inching toward higher capital requirements for the biggest banks. Unfortunately, the failure of the international FSB approach means that the Fed must largely go it alone.

Moreover, the Greeks and Spaniards are unlikely to be able to bear the strain of economic austerity much longer, with youth unemployment inching toward 60 . The independence movement in Catalonia has gathered so much momentum that a leading Spanish general has vowed to send troops into Barcelona should the province hold a referendum on secession.

Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species kind of like caterpillars and butterflies except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.