The recent turmoil in financial markets and China's economy has led some commentators to warn of a global crisis, but Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor of The London Telegraph isn't so sure.

"It has been a frightening summer," he acknowledges. China's economic growth has slowed to 3 to 5 percent, economists estimate; its stocks have dropped 40 percent since June 12; and its currency has fallen 3 percent since the government's devaluation two weeks ago.

Here in the United States, the S&P 500 index plunged 11 percent from Aug. 17 to Aug. 25.

But, "in the end you have to make a judgment call on whether this tangle of cross-currents in the world economy really is the start of another wrenching global crisis, or just a tremor," Evans-Pritchard writes. "This time I refuse to join the pessimists."

He says U.S. economic growth is accelerating. It registered 3.7 percent in the second quarter. And "Germany is rock solid."

Of course things also looked good prior to the downfall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Evans-Pritchard notes. "But this feels nothing like the prelude to the Lehman crisis, when the monetary data was flashing red warnings on both sides of the Atlantic, and US commercial lending was contracting at the fastest rate since records began."

To be sure, the volatility in financial markets certainly has grabbed the attention of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

The Harvard professor argued in a Washington Post piece Monday that the Federal Reserve should refrain from raising interest rates soon, and he told CNBC Tuesday that we're going through a dangerous period.

Until this week most economists expected the Fed to boost rates in September or December, but now uncertainty reigns.

"I'm not prepared to predict that we're in the midst of a crisis," Summers told CNBC. "But certainly the risks feel greater now than they have at moments in the past, and I think the orientation of policy, which had been toward resisting overconfidence, now has to again shift toward providing confidence."

There's a possibility of "significant instability," he said.

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