[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 [...]
February 5, 2013 Santiago, Chile Exactly ten years ago to the day, I was in the Kuwaiti desert waiting for George W. Bush to ‘make his decision’. You may remember the circumstances. Ever since labeling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the ‘Axis of Evil’ in January 2002, the President had been gradually advocating war with [...]
February 4, 2013 Santiago, Chile Midway through the Super Bowl stadium blackout yesterday evening (which seems a convenient metaphor for the decline of the West… something ripped out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged), I briefly ducked out on my guests to check email and read the news. Some friends had jokingly sent along an [...]
February 1, 2013 En route from Lima to Santiago Let’s end this week with something that we haven’t done in many, many moons: a Q&A. Each week, my staff receives hundreds of questions from the 100,000+ Notes from the Field readers… and given the utter insanity which pervades the West right now, it’s high time [...]
January 31, 2013 Lima, Peru It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to Lima, and I’m amazed at the growth that has taken place in that time. The level of disposable income has risen dramatically as more people have been pulled into the middle class. And despite the increase in the number of [...]
January 30, 2013 Central Chilean Coast [Editor's note: Sovereign Man contributor Darren Kaiser of Chile-Farmland.com is filling in today while Simon is en route to Peru.] sov·er·eign·ty n. pl. ·ties 1. The quality of having independent authority over a certain geographic area. 2. A territory existing as an independent state. Human beings have always striven to [...]
January 29, 2013 Southern Ecuador You know you’re no longer living in a free country when the government tells you what you can and cannot put in your body. Or when an unelected board of bureaucrats and corporate insiders can confiscate the assets of hardworking small business owners. Yet these have become par for the [...]
January 28, 2013 Isla Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands You know that saying people use all the time– “It’s a small world…” ? It’s really not. The world is huge. Really, really huge. This fact is continually impressed upon me as I travel. After nearly a decade of living nomadically and traveling to more than 100 [...]
January 25, 2013 Guayaquil, Ecuador Early in the 4th century, Emperor Diocletian issued an infamous decree to control spiraling wages and prices in the rapidly deteriorating Roman Empire. As part of his edict, Diocletian commanded that any merchant or customer caught violating the new price structures would be put to death. This is an important [...]
January 24, 2013 Santiago, Chile What would you do if you hit your breaking point… tomorrow? Where would you go? What would you do with your time and resources? It’s a great question worth asking. Some close friends of mine have been in town for the past few days escaping the northern winter and basking [...]
January 23, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Let’s do a little math problem today. As you probably know, in 2010 the US government passed one of the most arrogant, destructive, poorly conceived pieces of legislation in history, now known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). FATCA heaps all sorts of reporting requirements on [...]
January 22, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile The world learned on Sunday that PGA all-star Phil Mickelson is considering ‘drastic personal changes’ thanks to the pitiful direction of America’s tax policy. According to Mickelson: “If you add up all the federal and you look at the disability and the unemployment and the Social Security and [...]
Reporting from: Santiago, Chile Last week in the Land of the Free, a five-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was labeled a terrorist threat. Fortunately for the citizens of Northumberland County, local authorities managed to detain this nefarious kindergartener before she could exact her villainous deeds on thousands of innocents. Authorities were tipped off after someone overheard [...]
Reporting from: Santiago, Chile There’s a funny take on the Fiscal Cliff floating around the Internet that several of our keen subscribers have passed along. Like most things floating around the Internet, though, the details are inaccurate. So I’ve gone back and modified the parody with accurate numbers, and a bit more plot. What follows [...]
Location: Santiago, Chile A few years ago back when I used to watch an occasional bit of television, I would always have an internal debate with myself: which was more funny– Comedy Central, or CNBC? It was always a toss-up. One channel has talking puppets. The other has Steven Colbert. Both are satires of our [...]
Location: Santiago, Chile Sometimes the writing on the wall seems painfully obvious. But occasionally it’s a good idea to step back and look at the big picture: The Land of the Free is set to impose fresh restrictions on firearm ownership… to include a ban on assault weapons, increased background checks, psychological screenings, and criminalizing [...]
Location: Santiago, Chile Nearly three years ago, I wrote that Chile was ‘the new America’– free, civilized, open, and full of opportunity. After traveling and putting boots on the ground in over 100 countries, and having spent several years visiting Chile and watching it grow, I was convinced that the label was appropriate. It still [...]
Location: Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile I’m writing to you from the safest place in the world– a humble cabin in central Chile, nestled among 1,100 acres of some of the most productive farmland on the planet. From here, I grow my own organic food and raise my own livestock. I pump my own water, and [...]
Just a quick note today… a funny story to end the week. Like you probably do, my friend Larry keeps a large change bucket. Every night, he drops in a few coins that he might have picked up throughout the day… and gradually, it accumulates. Every now and again, Larry takes his change bucket to [...]