Quartz

Mobile money has an estimated potential worldwide revenue of $1 trillion within the next three years, and has become the “it” technology of the moment. The ability to send and receive money through cell phones simplifies the transaction process and offers customers both mobility and flexibility in managing their money. The most notable mobile money platform in the developing world, Kenya’s M-PESA, had 17 million subscribers as of December 2011, and other countries throughout the developed and developing world are quickly jumping on the bandwagon.

The big day is a week out. The campaigns and their allies are closing in on $2 billion spent; cable TV pundits are hoarse from months of spin and the urgency of the countdown; anxious partisans on both sides check daily tracking polls the way the superstitious look to their horoscope; the candidates are flying across the country nearly around the clock, appearing before ever larger crowds, their rhetoric raw, shed of any previous restraint. Because, as everyone keeps saying, the stakes have never been higher. Except they have been.

At some point in the next 200 million years, according to Yale University scientists, the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates will collide at the North Pole. When they are eventually joined by Africa, the singular super-continent will re-emerge, reminiscent of the Pangea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.

For years, global economists have forecast a slowdown in China’s breakneck growth. Now that the deceleration is actually here, rich-world investors, companies and government officials, reliant on the Chinese juggernaut for their financial well-being, seem impatient for the revelry to resume, and are hoping that the Chinese government will follow up its stimulus of package of 2008-2009 with another generous injection of capital. (On Sept.