Financial markets remain blissfully in denial of the many predictable global crises that could come to a head this year, particularly in the months before the US presidential election. In addition to the increasingly obvious risks associated with climate change, at least four countries want to destabilize the US from within.

For three decades, India's self-branding as the world’s fastest-growing free-market democracy worked, with world leaders queuing up to visit New Delhi and burdening a generation of diplomatic protocol officers. But in a matter of months, it has all begun to fall apart.

Now that US Senator Bernie Sanders has emerged as a leading contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, his brand of democratic socialism warrants closer scrutiny. Simply put, it is neither a close approximation of the "Nordic model" that Sanders often invokes nor a solution to what ails the American economy.