In an August 28 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Niall Ferguson writes: "Two years after the taper tantrum, this was the week of the Chimerican chill. Economist Moritz Schularick and I coined the word Chimerica in these pages in 2007, combining China and America, to describe the symbiotic relationship increasingly dominating the world economy. That is even truer now, as the past several days have shown. For the first time in financial history, a sneeze in Shanghai gave Wall Street—and almost every other stock market in the world—a cold."

Four weeks ago I was in London at a conference organized by one of the biggest U.S. banks. The program included a session with the dread title, “2014, The Death of Volatility?” As it followed a rash of similar presentations and articles this year—“The Strange Death of Volatility,” “The Day Volatility Died” and the like—I knew from experience that a spike in volatility was imminent. And sure enough, since the end of last month, financial markets around the world have gone from gliding up an escalator to riding a bucking bronco.

“The most beautiful flowers often grow on the edge of the precipice,” said the Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, during a debate about Ukraine’s European dilemma. Ever since the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” in 2004, Kiev has been edging toward closer integration with Europe. This was the case under the now-jailed Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the former prime minister, but also under her jailer, President Viktor Yanukovich. In large part thanks to Poland’s initiative, the European Union’s Eastern Partnership has become an antechamber for potential new members, covering not only Ukraine but a number of other “frontier” markets in the neighborhood, including Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Niall Ferguson writes that those planning to come to London for the Olympics should read Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March. For London today, he says, resembles nowhere more closely than fin-de-siècle Vienna—in good ways, but also in bad.

"Just when it seemed safe to start using the word "recovery," a Greek crisis is threatening the world economy, and the very existence of the world's second-biggest currency."

"A few years ago we came up with the term "Chimerica" to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy," says Niall Ferguson member of the Belfer Center's board of directors. "Correcting the economic imbalance between the United States and China - the dissolution of Chimerica - is now indispensable if equilibrium is to be restored to the world economy."