Threat to stability? You mean like the instability that comes from losing your job, or your house, or your health care? Like the instability of getting divorced so your spouse can get life-saving health coverage? Like the instability of making less now than you did in 2000? Like the instability of seeing your 401(k) vaporize, and the same guys who did that being put in charge of "reforming" Social Security? Like the instability of paying for student loans with nothing? Like the instability of going naked without work, with ten years to go before Social Security and Medicare kick in? That kind of "instability"?

Well, no. But its an interesting read nonetheless:

High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

Last month, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.

Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.

“Nearly everybody [yeah, no shit, Sherlock] has been caught by surprise at the speed in which unemployment is increasing, and are groping for a response,” said Nicolas Véron, a fellow at Bruegel, a research center in Brussels that focuses on Europe’s role in the global economy.

Millions of migrant workers in mainland China are searching for jobs but finding that factories are shutting down. Though not as large as the disturbances in Greece or the Baltics, there have been dozens of protests at individual factories in China and Indonesia where workers were laid off with little or no notice.

Many newer workers, especially those in countries that moved from communism to capitalism in the 1990s, have known only boom times since then. For them, the shift is especially jarring, a main reason for the violence that exploded recently in countries like Latvia, a former Soviet republic.

The ripples from the slowdown in Europe, North America and Asia are also being felt in Africa as migrant workers abroad lose their jobs and find themselves unable to send money home.

Since his last temporary job as a metalworker in Paris ended three months ago, Ignace Abdul has halted the monthly 200 euro payments he had been sending to his wife and three children back in Senegal. “Between 2004 and 2008, I worked nonstop,” Mr. Abdul, 30, said in an interview in a bleak Paris unemployment office. “Right now, there is nothing.”

The funny thing is, though the Times gives a lot of detail in the story about people whose jobs have been stolen from them by Tim Geithner's golfing buddies, there's no very little data on "instability" at all, beyond Iceland. No backup at all, that is, for Blair's assertion that "instability" is a national security threat.

I wonder why?