The Chinese stock market is plummeting so fast that authorities there keep shutting it down. North Korea set off a bomb in a nuclear test. Two of the Middle East's great powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are eyeing each other menacingly. In the European Union, political extremists are on the rise, migrants are pouring in and Britain may drop out (three phenomena that are not unrelated).
And in the United States, the number of people filing unemployment claims is hovering near the lowest levels in four decades, the jobless rate may well fall below 5 percent for the first time since 2007, and whatever the noise on the presidential campaign trail, Congress recently passed bipartisan legislation to keep the government running comfortably into next year.
Seven days in, 2016 is shaping up to be a chaotic year in global economics and geopolitics, with profound challenges nearly everywhere. Except, for now at least, in the world's largest economy. The U.S. economy is acting as a steadying force in a volatile world.
A giant question for 2016 — not just for Americans but for people across the globe who benefit from having one of the world's major economic engines revving while others sputter — is how resilient the United States will prove to be.
On one hand, in an interconnected global economy, troubles in one place can spread easily, whether through financial markets, the banking system or trade linkages. Just Thursday the World Bank downgraded its forecast of 2016 global growth, which implies less global demand for U.S. products — and fewer jobs for U.S. workers.
On the other hand, in the past the United States has shown an uncanny tendency to benefit economically from tumult abroad.
"The United States may not have incredibly robust economic growth and has plenty of problems you can point to," said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical consultancy. "But from a stability perspective, when things are more unstable, the United States in some ways gets stronger" as both people and investment dollars gravitate to the nation's relative stability.
The truth is, not one of the problems that have flared across financial news tickers so far in 2016 is completely new or surprising. Rather, they are continuations of trends that were well established in 2015.
And as disturbing as it may be to see tensions rise between the nations on either side of the Persian Gulf, conflict in the Middle East is not exactly new. Usually the way those tensions ripple through the global economy is by driving the cost of oil up; instead, the opposite is happening.
Oil prices fell to $37 a barrel from around $53 a barrel over the course of last year and are now under $34. The Shanghai composite index fell sharply starting in June, and even after steep declines in the opening days of 2016 is above its late-August level (although it is anybody's guess how much it would have fallen absent a string of government interventions to try to stanch the declines).
Economic growth has been slowing not just in China but across many emerging markets, including Brazil and Nigeria, for two years now. Europe and Japan are growing only barely, and even formerly hot advanced economies like Canada are suffering from the commodity glut.
Against that gloomy backdrop, the consensus U.S. economic forecasts — the International Monetary Fund forecasts 2.8 percent growth in 2016 — look pretty terrific. The U.S. stock market indexes, despite the global sell-off and major hits to oil companies' earnings, remain above their September levels.
But there are two basic questions about the notion that the United States can serve as an island of economic and political stability in a messy world.
First, what happens if that changes? Second, what happens if it does not?
The "things change" situation is the risk that these global headwinds become too powerful for the United States to overcome.
Already, oil producers and their suppliers are suffering. The U.S. industrial sector is groaning under the weight of a strong dollar, which drives up the price of exported goods. That is a consequence of the mismatch between growth in the United States and the rest of the world.
The strength in the U.S. service sector and the broader consumer economy has offset any damage so far. But the 2008 crisis showed how the global economy is intertwined in ways that are hard to predict — and that is before accounting for the geopolitical dangers from the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula that could cause major economic disruptions if they take a dark turn.
If something does go wrong, the usual buffers in the global economy look to be weakened or nonexistent right now. Government deficits are high in much of the world, and even where they are not, political leaders have shown no desire to open the spending floodgates in an effort to bolster economies. If the U.S. economy were to slump and President Barack Obama were to ask the Republican Congress for fiscal stimulus, it would give new meaning to "Dead on Arrival."
And central banks have flooded the world with so much easy money that it is not clear what further benefit new efforts would have. Why, for example, would we try a fourth round of quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve?
Then there is the less obvious risk from this mismatch between what is happening in the United States and the rest of the world — the risk of what happens if it doesn't change.
During the years running up to the 2008 crisis, the United States served as the global consumer of last resort. Americans kept shopping when the rest of the world hunkered down. The side effect of that role in the global economy was constantly increasing debt, which in the pre-crisis era frequently took the form of mortgage-related securities.
The longer other global economies remain a mess and the United States remains on a relatively steady course, the more these same forces will reassert themselves. This means that an ever-strengthening dollar will hobble U.S. exporters while fueling a U.S. consumption binge. Broadly, it would mean that crisis-era hopes of a more balanced global economy might not come to fruition.
In other words, the best thing that could happen for the global economy would be for the mismatch between the United States and the rest of the world to end — and not because the United States falters. Rather, it would happen if Europe and Japan achieved more rapid growth, China managed its shift toward a more consumer-driven economy and other emerging markets weathered a tough year while continuing their progress toward stable and sustainable growth.
It is a tall order for a world full of unpredictable risks. Good thing 2016 has another 51 weeks to go.