A few weeks ago, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere at almost 400 parts per million. Many scientists predicted that in reaching this level, we would see more intense storms (like Hurricanes Irene and Sandy); droughts (like the one suffocating the middle of the US for the past year); and heat waves (the 12 hottest years on record have all been in the last 15).

If we keep dumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere, many of these same climate seers predict far worse environmental, economic, and public health consequences. But there are signs that the low-carbon cavalry is coming over the hill to save us, despite political gridlock and the turning of a willful blind eye to both the problem and the opportunities for positive—and profitable—change.

Such optimism can be found in three recent developments that could reverse course before the 400 parts per million number soars higher. First, consider that Goldman Sachs is providing $500 million in lease-finance capital to Solar City to help put about 110 megawatts of solar energy systems on residential and commercial rooftops with little or no up-front cost. A 110-megawatt powerplant isn't huge, but it would power a small town and is only a part of the $40 billion in renewable energy investment that Goldman Sachs plans to make over the next decade.

Many students are tempted to believe that college is no longer a value proposition for them. After all, costs have risen over 1,100 percent since 1978, far outpacing inflation.

Fifty percent of the class of 2011 was unemployed or dramatically underemployed. In another survey, only 16 percent of employers reported that new hires from four-year colleges were "very qualified" for the workforce. Academically, one study showed that only 45 percent of students showed any meaningful cognitive gains after three semesters. Regardless of what one considers the purpose of college to be, it is clear that costly dysfunction is plaguing the system.

With such dismal outcomes across the board, is college still worth it?

Although largely reported as a fence-mending exercise in the wake of recent Sino-Indian border incidents, the Chinese Prime Minster Li Keqiang's visit to India last week was mostly about trade and finance between the two countries representing one-fifth of the world economy and a prodigious market of about 2.5 billion people.

The talk of mutual trust and consultation mechanisms was very much in the air, but the economy was on everybody's mind. While welcoming his Chinese guest in searing 46 degree Celsius heat, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh knew that in a few days he would be standing next to his boss, the governing Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi, waving a copy of his Report to the People – a sort of manifesto before next year's general elections - where India's declining economic growth is mainly ascribed to the euro area's recession and a sluggish U.S. economy.

It is a good bet that Mr. Singh suspected that Indian voters might think otherwise. A dispiriting thought no doubt at the time when the Congress Party is bidding for a third five-year term to lead the world's largest democracy. Not so much because, predictably, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promptly dismissed the idea that India's flagging growth was a result of weak export demand. No, Mr. Singh surely expected that the BJP would put the blame squarely on the government's mismanagement of the economy.

But the next blow was shattering: An opinion poll released last week showed that, if elections were held now, 31 percent of respondents would vote for BJP, while the Congress Party would get only 20 percent of the vote.

The weak economy will make it very tough to turn this situation around in the months ahead, even if there are no further desertions of the coalition partners and no major corruption scandals. Indeed, facing binding policy constraints of high inflation and budget and external deficits, it will be quite a challenge to stabilize the economy around its current 5 percent growth rate.

And the path from there to India's estimated growth potential of 8 percent will be even more difficult if there is a reversal of large capital inflows on growing speculations about less accommodative monetary policies in the United States and similar policy corrections in Japan. Markets are already signaling these events. Reversals of capital flows have also been foreshadowed in recent warnings by the Reserve Bank of India.

(Read More: This Could Devastate India's Prized IT Sector)

How Can Trade With China Help?

Capital outflows, or even slowing inflows of foreign savings, would put an end to India's further credit easing to stimulate domestic demand, because the financing of India's large trade deficits (6-7 percent of the gross domestic product) would require rising interest rates.

That is the economic environment in which Mr. Li's visit to India was taking place. And the question is: What role could a China guanxi (connection) play? There are several possibilities.

I spent one day in Detroit last week moderating a panel for a large Chinese industrial zone as well as for automakers. In the audience were CEOs and others seeking to understand trends in the automotive industry as they relates to China. It was a fascinating discussion.

Interestingly, while many consider China as the home of low-cost production, senior executives from companies and government officials indicated that this is changing. The low-cost advantage that China once enjoyed (at least in the East Coast cities called the Gold Coast) is starting to fade.

The Chinese are beginning to outsource to India and Africa. What is occurring is a major shift in China's economy where it will no longer be a purely low-cost manufacturing economy, but instead it will capitalize on a lower cost, highly educated labor force. Yes, Apple will make iPhones in China but that will change over time. Costs are rising.

(Read More: China Shaping Up for Another Disappointing Quarter)

For example, in the city of Hangzhou, there are 6 major universities providing highly skilled professionals working for Chinese industry. Additionally, after years of professional Chinese moving to the United States to work, this trend has now begun to reverse. Many Chinese immigrants are now moving back to China to take advantage of growing opportunity in their home country.

This means that China and its economy are changing, and the impact from an economic and market standpoint are significant. Growth rates (which had been driven by low-cost production in a booming global economy) will not be 12 to 14% ever again. Even a growth rate of 8% might be optimistic as the economy transitions from exports to internal consumption. More measured growth will likely be the norm.

(Read More: Is China Really Mulling a Lower Growth Forecast?)

It's clear that senior executives in the automotive industry find this transition to be attractive to capture the professional educated workforce graduating from Chinese universities. Selling to China's rising middle class is also perceived to be a huge opportunity. For example, Ford is opening new dealerships in China at the pace of one per week. Companies are moving business centers, research and development efforts, and other business units to China to have a presence in the Asian region and sell to the Chinese population.

What does this mean for investors?

This transition is a positive long-term trend for the global economy. In the long-term, it is a positive for the Chinese economy. In the short-term, it means that there are uncertainties about China's economy. For that reason, investors should be cautious in loading up too much on China investments; a transition is occurring. Consider U.S. Multinationals as a safer way to play China's long term story. And don't forget other Asian countries as a potential opportunity.

(Read More: India Gripes Over Border, Trade Woes on Li's First Foreign Trip)

The bottom line for investors is that long and short term matters when deciding on the proper weightings for your China investment plan. Its not the same old China; make sure you adjust accordingly.

Japan's bold monetary experiment is producing entirely predictable results: liquidity driven soaring equity prices and the sinking yen.

It will take more time to see the impact of all that on the real economy. The policy change is much too recent. The new leadership took over at the Bank of Japan on March 20, 2013, and the 10.3 trillion yen ($100 billion) stimulus package, announced on January 11, 2013, is unlikely to have led to instant, "shovel-ready," infrastructure projects.

College is too expensive, graduates can't find decent jobs and pay off their loans, and students, parents and educators all share in the blame. Now, President Barack Obama's is proposing a plan that would forgive more student loan debt -- but that will only make a bad situation worse.

More than half of recent graduates are working as waiters, taxi drivers or some other occupation that does not require a college education. The number in minimum wage jobs has doubled since 2007.

Slow growth and a tough jobs market is one reason, of course. But just as important: Too few college students choose tough majors like nursing, engineering and accounting that enjoy a robust demand for graduates. Instead, many still opt for liberal arts subjects, such as politics and history, and emerge with few practical skills for the working world.

Good jobs abound for technicians in health care, computers and other fields, and the Labor Department finds most rapidly growing occupations don't require a bachelor's degree. However, parents fear their children, without a four-year diploma, will lack the flexibility to navigate a lifetime of changing conditions.

(Read More: Forget Financial Aid, Soon-to-Be College Students Need Financial Ed)

If students are lazy and parents are risk adverse, university professors and presidents are far worse. Professors simply teach less and do more research of questionable value than they did in the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, a significant track record of publications was not required for tenure at most undergraduate faculties—advancing the frontiers of science and the arts was mostly the work of professors in post-graduate departments.

Nowadays, professors at all levels must publish to win tenure, but much of what they do adds little value to either the practical world or the advancement of knowledge in a purer sense. But it does require teachers to carry lighter teaching loads. Once tenured, many professors don't publish much, but still keep their light teaching schedules.

University bureaucracies are even worse—presidents and deans often have staffs bigger than CEOs and managers running much larger businesses. And faculties, which make virtually all decisions by consensus, spend endless hours in committees advising presidents and deans, and are supported by mind-numbing bureaucracies, too.

(Read More: Is Private School Worth the 'Entitlement' and Hefty Price?)

University presidents are politicians, not business managers. They understand who makes the choices (students), who pays the bills (parents) and who they must please in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of university governance—faculty.

They are rational: Instead of encouraging students to study useful subjects and containing sky-rocketing costs, they focus on fund raising and lobbying government officials to facilitate more student loans. Tuition jets into the stratosphere, students amass huge debt, and universities produce a lot of high-quality unemployment.

President Obama is rational, too. Parents, students and former students all vote. Instead of radically refocusing national policy to expand vocational education in high schools and community colleges, he promises to increase the percentage of Americans with four-year diplomas.

His proposed "Pay as You Earn," which came late last year, would forgive billions in student debt with federal dollars. Borrowers in the program would make payments equal to 10 percent of their monthly income, after rent and basic living expenses, and after 20-years of on-time payments would be forgiven of all debt—regardless of how much they had borrowed.

What the program fails to account for is that debt forgiveness simply encourages young people and parents to make poor choices, including borrowing too much. It will also embolden colleges to keep pushing up tuition—things the nation can't afford. It certainly won't help graduates find jobs.

To compete in the global economy and create good jobs at home, America needs workers with the right skills. That means limiting access to college to those who can genuinely profit from a university education, requiring professors to teach more and in on subjects that are truly useful in the workplace, and redirecting more of what the nation spends on education into other channels of vocational training.

Earth shattering monetary stimulus from the Bank of Japan, a threat to the safety of European deposits (courtesy of the Cyprus bailout), weeks of fretting over U.S. spending cuts - 2013 has given financial market participants an awful lot to digest so far.

This probably explains why perhaps the most significant story of them all seems to have passed most people by - China, and the increasing role its currency is having in the world.

Few would dispute China's end goal of having its currency, the yuan, become a genuine world reserve currency. Who wouldn't want cheap access to world capital markets that reserve currency status brings? Not to mention cheaper transaction costs on international trade.

Indeed most spectators also understand China's political motives in achieving reserve currency status for the yuan (more voting rights at IMF, World Bank etc). However, what does seem to be lost on the financial world right now is how quickly they are getting there.

Before we assess the steps China is taking to achieve this end, let's get reacquainted with the world of foreign currency reserves.

(Read More: How the Yuan Could Take the Dollar's Crown)

According to IMF data there is currently approximately $11 trillion of foreign exchange reserves sitting in the coffers of the world's central banks. $6 trillion of this is referred to as "allocated reserves" where the currency composition is known. Most of the remaining $4-5 trillion "unallocated reserves" are owned by China who choose not to divulge the currency composition of their foreign loot.

We know roughly 62 percent of "allocated reserves" are held in U.S. dollars, 23 percent in euros, 4 percent in yen, 4 percent in sterling with the Swiss franc, the Aussie and Canadian dollars making up the tiny remaining balance.

(Read More: Watch This Currency If You Want to Trade China)

The most striking aspect of these allocations is how uncorrelated they are to one distribution of international trade and two to distribution of world gross domestic product (GDP).

Most recent International trade data show the largest volume of trade of goods are distributed as follows - European Union 12.3 percent, U.S. 11.3 percent, China 11.3 percent, Japan 5 percent, U.K. 3.3 percent and South Korea 3.3 percent

As regards with world GDP, the order of distribution is not un-similar - E.U. 23 percent, U.S. 21 percent, China 10 percent, Japan 8 percent and U.K. 3.3 percent.

(Read More: Not Our 'Currency War': New Zealand Finance Minister)

Those reserve allocations just don't seem right do they?

Of course this issue is far from new - long have central bankers, politicians and economists mooted a fairer and more representative reserve currency system, with SDR (the IMF's Special Drawing Rights) often mentioned.

Well now it seems China's time has come.

Growth in global foreign currency reserves has exploded - the $11 trillion in central bank coffers today is over three times what it was 10 years ago. The dawn of monetary debasement via the printing press has rocked confidence in all the major currencies. Even gold no longer cuts it. The world is crying out for a new store of value - and the Chinese know it.

The Chinese yuan is not freely traded on the open market and its capital markets are far from fully open - so how is the yuan getting into the hands of those desperate to diversify reserves into this currency which offers fundamentally better value?

The rally in the gold market over the last several years has been based on a misunderstanding of the global economy's problems and a misunderstanding of what quantitative easing is.

Investors are just starting to realize that their framework for analysis can't account for what's happening in the world right now. They are gradually learning that the economics they learned from textbooks needs updating. That's why they are starting to throw in the towel on gold and why I expect the price to fall further.

The macroeconomic case for buying gold can be summed up by recent comments by John Reade, partner and gold strategist at Paulson & Co, who said: "federal governments have been printing money at an unprecedented rate creating demand for gold as an alternative currency. It is this expectation of global paper currency debasement which makes gold an attractive long-term investment." (Financial Times, April 15 2013). This analysis is based on a misunderstanding of quantitative easing. Furthermore, it fails to take into account the unorthodox behavior of an economy facing a "balance sheet recession."

Having broken through the 100 mark, U.S. dollar/yen has just kept on going. The recent Group of Seven (G-7) meeting gave no reason to sell as the group accepted the idea that a weaker currency is inevitable collateral damage from the monetary policy.

Of course, given that Japan's monetary policy is no different from the U.S. or Britain's, how can any of them complain?

Furthermore, it looks like Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's policies are already starting to bear fruit. Money supply growth has picked up a bit, bank lending is increasing, some prices are rising, the stock market is soaring…You can't argue with success.

The question now is how high can U.S. dollar/yen go? Fundamental value for a currency is set by purchasing power parity (PPP). Purchasing power parity is a simple idea: two currencies are at parity when a basket of goods and services costs the same in both countries.

If a Big Mac costs $3 in the U.S. and 300 yen in Japan, then purchasing power parity is 100 yen to the dollar. (And by the way, people do study the price of Big Macs for just that purpose, because they're widely available and the same everywhere.)

It should come as no surprise that employees today are struggling to balance work and personal responsibilities.

Longer work hours and more erratic work schedules, the increasing prevalence of two-career families, the demands of constant accessibility and global collaboration, and leaner operations have all created a recipe for strains in this area.

Indeed, Hay Group's global employee opinion database, comprised of data from more than 5 million employees worldwide, indicates that more than half of employees express concerns about the adequacy of staffing levels and over 40 percent report that their organizations do not provide sufficient work-life balance support.