This is my fourth take on how to worry in less than six months.

I wrote the first one in October when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had poked its head above 10,000 for the first time in a year (and the Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index...

Calendars here! Get your calendars here! Can't follow the Greek debt crisis without a calendar.

Have to have one. This crisis will either blow over in the next two months or so or run until the end of 2010 and threaten to take down Greek and German banks (German banks...

We're getting a lesson in exactly how messy a command economy can be in China right now. And it's roiling stock markets around the globe.

I'm sure that voters from Homer, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine, (and from Tokyo to Athens for that matter) have watched in envy over the last...

As far as I know, there's no financial-markets law saying that if some countries get a credit-rating downgrade, then others must get a credit-rating upgrade to keep the system in balance.

But right now it seems to be working that way.

The past year has brought credit-rating downgrades to Portugal,...

It's one thing when it's Greece or Portugal. A credit downgrade or warning for those two countries isn't exactly headline news for most investors. For most of our portfolios these are peripheral markets.

Ireland in trouble too? Yawn. Don't own any Irish stocks.

Italy? What's new? Italy's always running a...

It's a desperate gamble but Japan's Democratic Party government, headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, doesn't have much choice.

To break the hold of deflation on the Japanese economy, the country has to spend money--lots of money--it doesn't have to stimulate an economy that threatens to turn in a third...

Banks are moving loans off their balance sheets in order to dress up their accounts for worried regulators.

Only this time it isn't Citigroup (C) or State Street (SST) that's involved, but China's big banks.

In November China's banks packaged and then sold $18.6 billion in loans to Chinese trust...

Nothing like a market where volume is drying up as it usually does at the end of the year--which makes it easier for traders to move stocks on news and rumors. Especially when the world is so busy supplying lots of potentially market-moving headlines.

It's a potent combination. Enough to...

A lost decade.

1999 to 2009 sure qualifies for many investors in stocks.

A lost decade to come?

I can't tell you what stocks or stock markets will perform best over the next ten years. But I can tell you that many U.S. investors are still sitting in portfolios that...

Jimmy Choo -- well, his iconic, Sex-in-the-City shoes anyway -- is now on the war-torn economic frontline. So is Stella McCartney. Anna Sui. And, of course, McDonald's.

The battle is over the New Frugality, the current marketing hot button as the United States gradually emerges from the Great Recession.

Is...