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.

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.)

When will the U.S. Federal Reserve begin to move toward a gradually less accommodative credit stance? What instruments and techniques will it use to shrink its bloated balance sheet? Will that lead to widely circulated apocalyptic scenarios of crashing markets and financial institutions?

These are arguably among the most important questions investment strategists are wrestling with at the moment. I have discussed them in some of my previous posts, but here are a few updates to cover more recent developments.

The most useful thing to keep in mind with respect to the timing of the policy change is that the Fed is a short-term forecaster in the global economic universe. The fact that its forecasting track record is debatable is not helpful in trying to determine its policies' turning points. It is much more helpful to realize that – just as in the case of any other forecaster – the Fed's decisions are data driven.

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?

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.

Just when you thought showrooming was here to stay, the Senate throws brick-and-mortar retailers a lifeline.

For many physical retailers including Best Buy, a national Internet sales tax may signal the early arrival of Christmas. The potential collapse of the pricing advantage for online-only retailers may help brick-and-mortar models avoid a Circuit City fate. It is also good news for consumers, from a competitive stand point, and for states who will now collect much-needed incremental sales tax.

With yesterday's Senate vote of 69 to 27, passing the Internet sales tax, retailers are one step closer to a level pricing playing field. Now the bill moves on to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more push back. Some view the bill as an incremental tax on the consumer, despite the fact that consumers are supposed to self-declare Internet purchases on their tax returns.

Japan's yen weakened to 100 per U.S. dollar Thursday for the first time in four years. This was a critical market level, both psychologically and technically, as investors watch to see if "Abenomics" – the policies unveiled by Prime Minister Abe last fall – can finally overcome years of deflation and lackluster growth.

Monetary policy is the cornerstone of Abenomics. Under Abe's reign, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) has taken on a new governor and two new governors, all with more dovish attitudes. Not surprisingly then, this new BoJ has ratcheted up its version of quantitative easing. Hoping to reach a 2% inflation target in two years' time, the BoJ plans to expand its monetary base to 270 trillion yen by the end of 2014. That means that each month, the BoJ is buying almost as many of its bonds (about $76 billion per month) as the Fed is buying with QE ($85 billion per month), but in Japan's case, the buying is occurring with a notably smaller economy (one might call it "more bang for your yen," or "more QE per capita").

The U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB) are faced with opposite policy problems that will exert a greater and greater influence over the forex market in the next several months.

I expect the different stances of these two central banks to push the euro/dollar out of its recent trading range on the downside.

First let's take the Fed. The big debate at the Fed's March meeting, according to the minutes released in mid-April, was whether to "taper off" quantitative easing (QE) or not. Then the statement from the April meeting shifted the debate to the left when it said "the committee [Federal Open Market Committee] is prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its purchases to maintain appropriate policy accommodation…" The question became not whether to taper off or not, but whether to loosen further or to taper off.

But as usual the FOMC's statement also said that it would continue with QE "until the outlook for the labor market has improved substantially." That adds another question for the Fed: how do you define "substantial?" The April nonfarm payrolls data showed jobs have been rising an average of 200,000 jobs a month over the last seven months, versus only 130,000 a month as recently as last September. Does this qualify as "substantial"? Jeffrey Lacker certainly thinks it does.

Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Virginia, said about the figures, "I don't think there is any question...that we've seen substantial improvement in the labor market outlook over the last 6 months." Note the use of the phrase "substantial improvement." And just in case you missed the point, he added, "I think you ought to evaluate the likelihood of us reducing the pace of asset purchases accordingly."

As you read news headlines and listen to and watch media reports on the market, it's important to recognize that language may have different meanings depending on your perspective. Just last week the media reported that J.C. Penney stock "soared" 11 percent—on the surface that seems to be a positive enough development.

While "soaring" is certainly more positive than "plunging," soaring suggests good news at J.C. Penney and for most investors this is how they will take the headline. Those investors will not look below the surface for the complete story.