A woman is ever fickle and changeable.

I'll eat almost anything, but I'm very fickle when it comes to cheese.

Producers in Jiangsu, for example, were forced to adapt constantly to fickle product safety and environmental standards in export markets. Compared to producers in the US and Europe, those in China are weakly organized and passive.

DUBLIN Bond markets are notoriously fickle, often driven by sentiment rather than rigorous macroeconomic analysis, and, as the 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated, they are far from infallible. They can also be particularly unreliable when assessing an economy s long term prospects.

I think there are only two exceptions that I'm aware of two year olds, they are not rational, they have very fickle preferences, they switch what they think all the time, and schizophrenics are probably not rational, but pretty much everybody else is rational.

Indeed, he has become the first elected Thai leader to finish a four year term, be re elected, and preside over a one party government. Thaksin s dominance of Thai politics is unprecedented, and his resilient popularity in the face of a fickle electorate is unparalleled.

As the title of a recent paper published by the International Monetary Fund succinctly puts it, Capital Flows are Fickle Anytime, Anywhere. The mere announcement that the Fed might scale down its unconventional monetary policy operations has led to today s capital flight from emerging markets.

The problem is not just that they need to wean themselves from their reliance on fickle capital inflows and commodity booms, which have often left them vulnerable to shocks and prone to crises. More important, export oriented industrialization, history s most certain path to riches, may have run its course.

The new world order has given way to an order less world, in which reliability and predictability have given way to rapid shifts in focus and fickle commitments. And, sadly, this state of affairs seems to be emanating not from countries in crisis, but rather from the US itself.

It is not that we should feel nothing but we should be encouraged to think more and to prevent the wound rather than pay for the Band Aid. In a media culture that can deliver instant stardom and fickle trends, our attention shifts too rapidly to see the forest for the trees.

While Karzai has been fickle, to say the least, about cooperation with the Americans (indeed, he has since backed away from participation in the Doha talks), the rupture of his political alliance with non Pashtun leaders has also fueled ethnic polarization. Some non Pashtun power brokers continue to support Karzai, but many others are now leading the opposition National Front.

Conglomerates allow financial institutions to diversify their business, and combining with commercial banks allows investment banks to fund their operations using relatively stable deposits instead of fickle money markets. This model has proven its viability in Europe over a period of centuries, and its advantages are evident in the US even now with Bank of America s purchase of Merrill Lynch.

In short, Latin American countries have used their additional export revenues to pay down debt and increase social spending. Both were necessary, but, with few exceptions, the region is not using the commodity windfall to do what it must improve technological capacities sufficiently to ensure that future economic growth does not depend entirely on the fickle furtunes of finite natural resources.

Of course, the people are never truly one fickle in their loyalties and subject to demagoguery, they often unite in opposition but fracture once in command. Nonetheless, the willingness of large numbers of people to stand up (or sit in) for their right to be heard, despite the imminent possibility of violent repression, announces to their fellow citizens and the world that something has gone very wrong.