Category: Trends & News

March 31, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile There’s nothing like a nice cup of reality first thing on Monday morning. If you’ve been a reader for any length of time, you know one of the things I periodically do is scan headlines for phrases like “record high” or “all time high”. The results

March 27, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Today just happens to be the 160th anniversary of Britain and France’s declaration of war on Russia in what would eventually become known as the Crimean War. Part 1. At the time, Russia was a rising power. By the 1850s, Tsar Nicholas I had expanded Russia’s

By the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had become a has-been power whose glory days as the world’s superpower were well behind them. They had been supplanted the French, the British, and the Russian empires in all matters of economic, military, and diplomatic strength. Much of this was due to the Ottoman Empire’s

March 24, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile When it comes to investing money, there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Even the ‘safest’ investment in the world (US Treasuries) is anything but safe. I mean… on what planet does it make sense to loan your hard-earned cash to the biggest debtor that

March 24, 2014 Bali, Indonesia Palladium is like the Rodney Dangerfield of precious metals. It never gets any respect. If you ask someone about precious metals, in fact, just about everyone has heard of gold and silver. And occasionally platinum. But palladium is one of those obscure precious metals that few people think

A few months ago, I told you about a bold report published within the IRS that absolutely blasted the agency’s mafia tactics. In its 2013 annual report to Congress, the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate wrote that the IRS shows “disrespect for the law and a disregard for taxpayer rights.” Further, the report

As any long-time reader of this column knows, we routinely draw from historical lessons to highlight that this time is not different. Throughout the 18th century, for example, France was the greatest superpower in Europe, if not the world. But they became complacent, believing that they had some sort of ‘divine right’ to

March 19, 2014 Santiago, Chile Truth can be a damn difficult thing to digest sometimes. Some of us have been there. You get that news from the doctor that you, or a loved one, has just been diagnosed with a serious disease, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. Several years

Forget tapering. Forget Ukraine. The largest single risk to the world economy and financial markets right now is China. What’s going on in China reminds me a lot of what I witnessed firsthand when I lived in South Korea in the 1990s, before that economy’s crash in 1998. Just as China now, South

March 14, 2014 Ambergris Caye, Belize One of the great things about being a foreigner in developing countries is how easy it is to get access to influential decision-makers. If you’re in the UK or US, for example, the chances of sitting down with the President or Treasury Secretary are almost nil. In

March 14, 2014 Ambergris Caye, Belize My research team recently passed along a piece of legislation they were looking at called the “ENFORCE the Law Act of 2014.” It immediately piqued my interest… because anytime you see all CAPS in government documents, it signifies some absurd acronym. And the ‘ENFORCE the Law Act’