Being a sovereign man is not just about diversifying and internationalizing your assets across national borders. It’s as much about your mindset and the way you view the world and the events that are happening around you. Your worldview is heavily dependent on the knowledge and ideas that you are exposed to, but as demonstrated [...]
[Editor’s note: Sovereign Man’s resident Chilean property guru, Darren Kaiser, is filling in for Simon today.] As a property investor and speculator, I’m always studying trends and looking for anomalies. Learning about the history of a place, how it came to be as it is today, and then making predictions about what it will be [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile One would think that certain truths are obvious by now. It should be obvious, for example, that there are consequences to living beyond your means. It should be obvious that there are consequences to a long history of spending unsustainably and accumulating mountains of debt. And it should be obvious that [...]
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile To anyone paying attention, reality is now painfully obvious. These bankrupt, insolvent governments have just about run out of fingers to plug the dikes. And history shows that, once this happens, governments fall back on a very limited playbook: Direct confiscation As Cyprus showed us, bankrupt governments are quite [...]
[Editor's note: Tim Price, frequent Sovereign Man contributor and Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in the UK, is filling in for Simon today from London, England.] Like Lehman Brothers before it, Cyprus may well come to be seen not so much as the cause of further crisis but as yet another symptom of [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Sometimes I wake up and I’m just astounded at how quickly things are unraveling. Just look at a few big picture points: The Russians are now wagging their fingers at Europe, comparing the EU to the Soviet Union for trying to plunder Cypriot bank accounts. This on the heels of a [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile In 1729, that Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels fame) penned a famous satirical essay from England entitled “A Modest Proposal.” It’s still famous to this day as mandatory reading in many a high school literature class. As you may recall, Swift addresses the problem of the ultra-depressed Irish economy and mockingly [...]
[Editor's note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in from London, England while Simon is touring agricultural property today.] If there was ever a policy manual on how to deal with recession, the Fed and ECB’s copies have fallen out of the ugly tree and [...]
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile As you no doubt have heard by now, the government of Cyprus announced Saturday morning (when the banks were closed) that they would impose a ‘levy’ on bank deposits. Originally they announced levies of 9.9% for accounts above 100,000 euros, and 6.7% for accounts below 100,000 euros. In the [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Earlier in the week, I wrote to you about an Argentine car rental agency that had started accepting Bitcoins as a means to bypass local capital controls. We received a lot of questions about the article, the most common of which was “What in the world is a BITCOIN?” Let’s start [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Five-year plans in the Land of the Free? Apparently it’s not that far off from reality. Yesterday Senator Tom Harkin introduced S. 544, “a bill to require the President to develop a comprehensive national manufacturing strategy.” In effect, Senator Harkin wants the President to centrally plan the economy. Never mind that [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Several hundred miles east of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the mighty Kasai river forms the boundary between two little known tribes of central Africa– the Bushong and the Lele. Ostensibly there should be scant difference between the two; they’re separated only by a river, and they share a [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile There is no such thing as a ‘good’ fiat currency. Any model in which a tiny banking elite wields dictatorial control over a nation’s unbacked paper money supply is deeply flawed. The concept itself is dangerous, and comparing fiat currencies is like debating which is the ‘least harmful’ poison. That being [...]
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile It’s a pretty sad state of affairs in the Land of the Free when they have to pass a law making it illegal for the government to assassinate its own citizens. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. Late last week, US Senator Ted Cruz introduced Senate bill S.505, “A bill [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile The Dow Jones Industrial Average, one of the key benchmarks of the US stock market, has soundly surpassed its all-time high. And most of the investing world is toasting their collective success and celebrating the recovery. It’s a funny thing, really. Most investors only think in terms of ‘nominal’ numbers, i.e. [...]
[Editor’s note: Sovereign Man Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in today from Busan, South Korea, while Simon is out looking at South American agricultural property investments.] Over dinner with a friend in Busan, South Korea yesterday, the conversation turned to residency and second citizenships. My friend is a successful entrepreneur who’s lived in [...]
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile In official testimony before Congress in December 1912, just three months before his death, J.P. Morgan stated quite plainly: “[Credit] is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else.” (the quote is almost Shakespearean in its unrhymed iambic pentameter…) Of course, this testimony came only 253 days [...]
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Throughout history, bankrupt governments in decline almost ALWAYS fall back on a time-tested playbook. This includes imposing controls on EVERYTHING– wage and price controls, trade controls, capital controls, border controls, people controls. Everything. And this idea goes back to the dawn of human civilization. The Third Dynasty of Ur [...]
[Editor’s note: Tim Staermose, Sovereign Man’s Chief Investment Strategist is filling in for Simon today from San Jose, Costa Rica.] It’s easy to see why people like Costa Rica so much. The country is gorgeous, and the climate can be excellent. There are plenty of cooling breezes to keep it comfortable year-round, despite the tropical [...]
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile For the last few weeks, I’ve had a steady stream of visitors make the trek down to Chile to escape the Northern Hemisphere winter and get a little taste of freedom. Chile is a place that will soon be the easiest place in the world to establish a business. [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile I really hate to beat a dead horse, but I wouldn’t be doing my job for you if I didn’t point out some of the most intellectually dishonest, self-aggrandizing Bernanke-speak to come out of the Fed Chairman’s testimony yesterday: “[The Federal Reserve has] 25 years of success in keeping inflation low [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile “There is no bar to this nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.” — US Senator Carl Levin My dictionary defines the word “sociopath” as “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. I don’t know [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile By 1789, a lot of French people were starving. Their economy had long since deteriorated into a weak, pitiful shell. Decades of unsustainable spending had left the French treasury depleted. The currency was being rapidly debased. Food was scarce, and expensive. Perhaps most famously, though, the French monarchy was dangerously out [...]
[Editor's note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in from London, England while Simon is touring agricultural property today.] When Moody’s downgraded the UK’s sovereign credit rating last week it was something of an anti-climax. The ratings agencies long ago lost what little credibility they [...]
Reporting From: Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile ViaMat, a Swiss logistics company that has been safeguarding precious metals since 1945, is literally the gold standard in secure storage. They have vaults from Switzerland to Hong Kong to Dubai, and they count among their clients some of the largest mining companies in the world. They know [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Yesterday I had the opportunity to break bread with a good friend of mine who is an alumnus of the Startup Chile entrepreneurship program. This is a really unique program that the government launched in 2010 at the behest of one of Chile’s leading entrepreneurs. In its first few months, Startup [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Apparently the Latino version of Jusin Beiber is in town. I have no idea who this kid is, but as I was walking into the W Hotel last night for a meeting, there were hundreds and hundreds of adoring prepubescent girls lining the metal cordon that had been set up outside [...]
Reporting from Santiago, Chile In another brilliant move aimed at destroying the few table scraps of economic freedom which remain in the Land of the Free, a bipartisan group of esteemed lawmakers in the United States Congress has introduced the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013. Remember the golden rule of legislation: the more noble the [...]
[Editor's note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in the UK and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in for Simon today from London, England.] “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.” – Warren Buffett Warren Buffett’s aphorism has been rightly celebrated. But to be a true value investor, [...]
Reporting from the 6th Region, Central Chile We’ve discussed many times before—hardly a month goes by without some major action against Internet users… from Obama’s ‘kill switch’, to ACTA, SOPA and PIPA, to stasi tactics against people like Kim Dotcom. Online privacy is becoming more important by the day. And nobody is going to give [...]
[Editor’s Note: Darren Kaiser, Sovereign Man’s Chilean property consultant, is filling in for Simon today from Santiago, Chile.] During most of the 2000s, I patiently sat on the sidelines while the paper-fueled run up in asset prices (primarily stocks and real estate) in my home country took off. I always thought that when the cheap [...]
Reporting from Buenos Aires, Argentina Selling snake oil and issuing unbacked paper currency are not so different. They’re both wildly successful ploys for the guys pulling the strings. And they’re both complete scams that depend solely on the confidence of a willing, ignorant public. But once the confidence begins to erode, the fraud unravels very, [...]
Reporting from Punta del Este, Uruguay “Charming” is, I believe, the word most often used to describe Uruguay. People tend to make a lot of parallels to the United States in the 1950s– a much slower pace of life, less government intrusion, and family focused. The capital city of Montevideo is notoriously sleepy and provincial. [...]
Five full years on from the financial crisis, stock markets have regained lost ground and are within striking distance of new record highs. Yet, it’s only NOW, after all the gains from the bottom have been made, that the investing crowd is starting to put money back into stocks. Curious. When stocks were CHEAP, nobody [...]
February 6, 2013 Santiago, Chile Chile is about to become the easiest place in the world to form a company and start a business. According to a new law that was recently passed, the Chilean government is slashing the bureaucracy associated with forming a company here to the absolute minimum. Currently, it takes a few [...]