At a meeting of the Nonaligned Movement in the Malaysian city of Putrajaya this week, Iran's Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki announced to reporters that "there is no such country" as Israel. 

Since Israel does indeed exist, Mottaki means that Iran doesn't diplomatically "recognize" Israel's existence, that Iran wants to extinguish the political existence of Israel, that Israel's current existence is accidental, an illusion that will be swept away by the total triumph of Islam in the Middle East. 

Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni should now feel free to announce that there is no such country as Iran.  Its existence as an intact nation-state is make-believe.  Its existence is as ephemeral as the Soviet Union's or Yugoslavia's, and is soon to break apart as did they. 

Last week in Iran Unraveling? you learned about the protest demonstrations by Turkish-speaking ethnic Azeris (who make up over 1/3 of Iran's population) over a cartoon in a government newspaper depicting Azeris as cockroaches.  The demos grew this week and are getting violent.

OK - welcome to 2014!  What's in store for the world this year?  Beats me.  How should I know?  The future hasn't happened yet. 

We can be supremely confident that the sun will without exception continue to rise in the east (although I did see the sun set in the east and rise in the west one day - it's a story), that there will be a full moon this coming January 16, and that ostriches will not spontaneously turn into elephants on the Serengeti Plains.

The laws of physics and nature will continue to hold.  Beyond that, regarding human activity predictions have to be heavily larded with caveats, because there's no way of telling when black swans will appear out of the ether to bite us in the glutes, or what random grain of sand will collapse a country's sand pile.

So let's talk of possibilities and opportunities.  For the fact is that there's no such thing as the future.  Instead, there is a very large number of possible futures - with some being much more likely than others.  What might they be?

Let's hop around the world a bit first before focusing on the US.

This week, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is slated to release its fourth report since 1990. Leaked copies indicate an admission that there has been no global warming for the past 16 years, but the report will also increase its probability from 90 percent to 95 percent that global warming ? if it does occur ? is caused by man.

Not one of the major climate models on which the panel bases its predictions forecast the lack of warming over the past 16 years, even though the models do vary widely as to how much warming they predicted.

Not to be outdone, President Obama again is warning us that if the Republicans do not vote for more government spending in the budget battles that are now upon us, we will go back into a recession. You may have not noticed we had left the recession, since employment levels are still below where they were five years ago. The president, of course, does not make such statements off the top of his head, but on the basis of his economic-forecast models. You might ask: "How accurate have these models been in forecasting?"

Please note the accompanying table for the answer...

There are no one-way bets in global finance, but Japan's stock market comes close. The authorities are about to funnel astronomical sums into Japanese stocks openly and deliberately under the next phase of Abenomics, both by regulatory fiat and by purchasing the Nikkei index directly with printed money.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe is unshackling the world's biggest stash of savings, the $1.3 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF). Officials say the ceiling on equity holdings will rise from 12% to around 20% as soon as August, opening the way for a $100 billion buying blitz.

Mr. Abe's move comes sooner than expected and amounts to a market shock, though nobody should be shocked anymore as he keeps doubling down on the world's most radical economic experiment.

The Nikkei index stalled in December after rising almost 100% since September 2012, even though the Bank of Japan (BoJ) is still showering the economy with money, buying $75 billion of bonds each month. The BoJ's balance sheet will reach 70% of GDP by March 2015, three times the US Federal Reserve's.