Category: Z Legacy: Expat

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How to save 8.25% in 90 seconds flat…

January 10, 2013 Santiago, Chile Lately I’ve had a ton of friends and family writing me about visiting Chile. “We’re fed up with this place,” is how the emails usually start. People are hitting their breaking points and starting to consider their options abroad. There are a lot of fantastic places to be.

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Arbitrage lessons from the most expensive city on Earth

January 9, 2013 Sydney, Australia   [Editor’s note: Sovereign Man Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in for Simon today.] No matter where you live in the Western world right now, the sands of your local economic landscape are likely shifting. To gain your footing, it’s essential to learn classic arbitrage techniques.

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Inertia

January 8, 2012 Fundo Los Soberanos, Chile In 1687, English mathematician and natural philosopher Isaac Newton published a groundbreaking scientific work about the three basic axioms which govern the mechanics of the world around us. Today we call them the Laws of Motion. Colloquially, the first Law of Motion states that an object

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Out of the frying pan, into the frying pan

January 7, 2013 Talca, Chile There are few original thinkers in professional finance. It’s much easier for an individual to step back and say, “Holy Meltdown, Batman, this system is deeply, woefully, fundamentally flawed…” I can see it, you can see it. But somehow, as soon as they put someone in charge of

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Capital controls, trade controls, border controls…

January 4, 2013 Buenos Aires, Argentina Humbly I will ask you to please excuse the 48+ hour hiatus since we last spoke. I ate some tainted beef Tuesday evening that caused some of the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had in my life. It wasn’t pretty. Being sick is a funny thing… it

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The prisoner’s dilemma

January 2, 2013 Buenos Aires, Argentina In Game Theory, there’s a famous hypothetical scenario called the Prisoner’s Dilemma in which two criminal suspects are apprehended by police and given a choice: stay silent, or rat out the other guy. But there is a catch. If both suspects stay silent, they both get off

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Presenting the decline of the West in two easy infographics

December 27, 2012 Santiago, Chile Two interesting infographics were published recently that make it so easy to see the decline of the West, even a caveman can do it. The first is from the Brookings Institute, which has released an interactive map showing economic growth data for the largest 300 metropolitan areas in

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One simple question you need to ask yourself

December 20, 2012 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Everyone has a catalyst. A breaking point where we finally say, “enough is enough” and finally begin to take action. Maybe it’s watching your beautiful daughter be sexually assaulted by government agents for having committed the crime of flying to Disney World. Or having some government

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And… another one reaches his Breaking Point

December 20, 2012 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile French actor Gerard Depardieu paid 85% of his income in taxes last year. He claims to have paid nearly $180 million in taxes over his 45-year career. With Francois Hollande’s latest round of tax increases in France, Depardieu has reached his breaking point. As you’ve probably

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Some clear thinking on a very uncomfortable topic

December 19, 2012 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile I think we can all agree that a man walking in to an elementary school and opening fire is deeply, deeply horrific. And in the gut-wrenching social introspection that comes afterwards, the desire to ‘do something’ is understandable. These days, the role of government in the

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Inflation vs. Deflation: Cui Bono?

In the days of ancient Rome when the republic was still a republic, Lucius Cassius, one of the city’s most venerated consuls, famously coined the phrase cui bono. It means As a benefit to whom?, and Lucius Cassius, inquisitive and analytical by nature, was always asking the question… whether he was investigating a

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Goons versus Gold

Credit expansion, wrote the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, is not a nostrum to make people happy. “The boom it engenders must inevitably lead to a debacle and unhappiness.” That seems a pretty accurate summary of the current situation for the western economies: a debacle, and unhappiness. Von Mises also wrote that

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About as scientific (and effective) as bloodletting…

December 14, 2012 Santiago, Chile Many years ago, back when I was a fresh second lieutenant straight out of the academy, my battalion executive officer summoned me to his office one day saying that he had a ‘mission’ for me. I hurried over, wondering what this special mission might be. Several members of

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“If that makes us cockroaches, we can certainly live with the label.”

December 10, 2012 London, England [Editor’s Note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor, is filling in for Simon today.] Clearly, investing is a probabilistic endeavour. There are no certainties to speak of. We can only operate on the basis of rational analysis and prudent, considered

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The luckiest people on the planet

December 10, 2012 São Paulo, Brazil Brazilians are the luckiest people on the planet. Aside from being blessed with great weather, gorgeous beaches, and beautiful people, their country is one of the few that can exist in a state of complete independence from the rest of the world. They have their own energy

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