Unsettling America

It's very unsettling.

Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs.

I know this must be a very unsettling time for all of you.

But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing.

Three factors all likely to persist this year are driving these unsettling trends.

Indeed they came near to unsettling you, so that they might expel you from the land, but in that case they themselves would not have stayed on for very long after you.

Indeed they came near to unsettling you, so that they might expel you from the land, but in that case they themselves would not have stayed on for very long after you.

Because we have heard that some who went out from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls, saying, 'You must be circumcised and keep the law,' to whom we gave no commandment

Because we have heard that some who went out from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls, saying, 'You must be circumcised and keep the law,' to whom we gave no commandment

Nonetheless, some aspects of Chinese behavior remain unsettling and complicate our relationship. Last year, a US Department of Defense report noted that China s defense expenditures appear to be much higher than acknowledged by the Chinese government.

Yet all of this leaves out the possibility of change, particularly change influenced by the United States unsettling role in the world. The idea that the US is a status quo power is a delusion of international relations experts.

The follow up summits were lame. The idea of coordinated fiscal stimulus became problematic when it became obvious that many European governments could not take on more debt without unsettling markets and pushing themselves into an unsustainable cycle of increasingly expensive borrowing.

During the 1990 s, however, Anwar increased his influence within the party, unsettling many of the old guard. Matters came to a head after the 1997 financial crisis, when Anwar, the deputy prime minister, adopted an even more economically liberal approach than Mahathir.

Finding affordable housing has become an increasingly serious problem for those relocating to cities for the first time. And corruption scandals and the related risks of political turmoil were unsettling, to say the least, in the months prior to last year s Communist Party leadership transition.

It is intellectually and politically unsettling to realize that, if the West cannot quickly straighten out its systems of government, only politically un reformed states like China will be able to make the decisions that a nation needs to survive in today s high speed, high tech, increasingly globalized world.

One unsettling consequence of US diplomacy is that it has reinforced Iran s role in Iraq, because Maliki is Iran s preferred candidate for Prime Minister. Thus, at the very moment that the US is leading a global campaign to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, it is strengthening Iran s regional position.

Of course, transparency is unsettling whether it s seeing your own wrinkles in the mirror, or confirming unpleasant aspects of how others treat you. Transparency is unambiguously good for companies and for governments by and large they don t welcome it, but it makes them more accountable to their constituents and to society.

FORT LAUDERDALE At the World Economic Forum s annual meeting in Davos last month, leading participants called for a rapid shift to cleaner energy to tackle climate change. There is something unsettling about the global power elite jetting into an exclusive Swiss ski resort and telling the rest of the world to stop using fossil fuels.

The disturbance to so elemental a part of this region s natural architecture is a measure of only one of the many kinds of severe weather aberrations from floods and droughts to unseasonal blizzards and massive dust storms that have been unsettling China of late. No one can say with any certainty what the causes are.

It is deeply troubling that the US has allocated 185 billion to augment its nuclear stockpile over the next decade, on top of the ordinary annual nuclear weapons budget of more than 50 billion. Just as unsettling is the Pentagon s push for the development of nuclear armed drones H bombs deliverable by remote control.

This brings us to a third, and even more unsettling possibility a longer and more protracted negotiation, resulting in greater disruptions to government entitlement payments, other contractual obligations, and public services. Creditors would then ask many more questions before adding to their already considerable holdings of US government debt, generating still more headwinds in a US economy that already faces an unemployment crisis and uneven growth.

NEWPORT BEACH A new economic order is taking shape before our eyes, and it is one that includes accelerated convergence between the old Western powers and the emerging world s major new players. But the forces driving this convergence have little to do with what generations of economists envisaged when they pointed out the inadequacy of the old order and these forces implications may be equally unsettling.

That question, often raised in the past, has been heating up in the aftermath of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan s emotional outburst during the recent World Economic Forum 2009 in Davos, when he abruptly left a panel he was sharing with Israeli President Shimon Peres. And the Turkish question matters greatly, because it touches on some of the most unstable and unsettling of the world s diplomatic disputes.

Frankly, although I do not see the five year old global expansion coming to an end yet, there is no question that risks are on the rise, with output in the United States having slowed sharply in the third quarter, and central banks hands tied by inflation risks. Further ahead, it is not hard to imagine geopolitical instability possibly emanating from Iran, Iraq, or North Korea unsettling markets.

Such political paralysis on key economic issues is increasingly unsettling for the US private sector, and for other countries that rely on a strong US at the core of the global economy. This helps to explain why so many companies continue to hoard cash, rather than investing domestically, and why a growing number of countries want to diversify gradually away from dependence on the dollar as the reserve currency and on US financial markets for intermediation of their hard earned savings.