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April 30, 2015 En route from Mexico City, Mexico I’m certainly a proponent of taking advantage of everything the world has to offer. This includes looking for nice places all over the world. I love spending time in Thailand, Italy, Chile, Croatia, Brazil… But sometimes we forget what’s in our own backyard. It’s
April 28, 2015 Cancun, Mexico One of my favorite historians is a guy named Will Durant. Durant is unfortunately no longer with us, but he and his wife Ariel made history more interesting than all the soap operas my mother used to watch when I was a kid. I thought about something he
April 27, 2015 Cancun, Mexico What an incredible experience. We just spent the last three days with 375 of the most interesting people I’ve ever met down here in Cancun. Our Global Offshore and Investment Summit was absolutely jam-packed. And a ton of fun. We were joined by brilliant financial luminaries like Dr.
April 21, 2015 Cancun, Mexico Imagine having a net worth of $57 billion. That sounds like a lot. And for the few folks out there like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Vladimir Putin who have racked up such a prodigious amount, it is a lot. But not if you’re the US Federal Reserve.
April 20, 2015 En route to Mexico In October 1925, English mathematician Karl Pearson began publishing a multipart series of groundbreaking articles in the Annals of Human Eugenics. The series was entitled, “The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children,” and it went
April 17, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Let’s talk about idiots. Somewhere out there, some absurdly well-paid banker just placed his investors’ capital in yet another financial instrument which is guaranteed to lose money: Australian government debt. 47 investors participated in the Australian government’s $200 million bond tender; the participants typically bid the
April 14, 2015 Santiago, Chile 70 years ago, the United States of America had just emerged from World War II as the most dominant superpower in the world. At that point America’s economy was the only one left standing. And the US government had essentially dictated terms in establishing a new global financial
April 13, 2015 Santiago, Chile On March 16, 1936, the government of the United States published the very first edition of the Federal Register. President Roosevelt had been taking a lot of heat over the previous year; under his New Deal program, dozens of government agencies were passing new rules, regulations, and codes
April 10, 2015 Panama City, Panama After an incredibly pleasant week in Medellin, I departed this morning for Panama where the capital city’s already notoriously painful traffic has become a parking lot in the wake of the Summit of the Americas. Leaders from most of the Western Hemisphere are here for the summit,
April 7, 2015 En Route to Colombia Despite being an otherwise staid, traditional news service, the professional banking division of the Financial Times recently released an utterly scathing assessment of the British economy. It was entitled, “The UK economy is a ticking time bomb,” and the editor didn’t pull any punches in completely
April 6, 2015 Santiago, Chile Last week, the government of China closed the enrollment window to join its new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a ‘founding member’. The AIIB, if you haven’t heard of this yet, is designed to essentially displace the Western-controlled IMF and World Bank. And prior to last Tuesday’s
April 2, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Every few centuries or so, an amazing new technology comes along that fundamentally changes human civilization. There are so many other examples throughout history. The Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution. The invention of the printing press. The printing press was a particularly interesting parallel for what’s
April 1, 2015 Santiago, Chile Several months ago, the government of Australia proposed to tax bank deposits up to $250,000 at a rate of 0.05% (5 basis points). Their idea was for the money to be invested in a rainy day Financial Stabilization Fund to insure against in the unlikely event of a
March 31, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Yesterday we discussed the utter insanity of the debt-based education system—the trillion+ dollar explosion of student loans out there that may very well be the next bubble to burst. It’s a completely ridiculous system which saddles 22-year olds with tens of thousands of dollars of debt
March 30, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile What I’m about to tell you is not my own opinion or even analysis. It’s original data that comes from the United States Federal Reserve and national credit bureaus. 40 million Americans are now in debt because of their university education, and on average borrowers have
