Category: Lifestyle Design

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Predictions? Or near-certainties?

January 2, 2012 Coyhaique, Northern Patagonia New Year’s predictions are always a fun exercise. We can bet each other over the price of gold on December 31, 2012, or who will win the White House this year, or even make wild, black swan predictions. It’s like the Charades of thought experiments… good for

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Why hold gold in deflation?

December 23, 2011 Santiago, Chile First off, happy holidays. I hope this email finds you in good health and cheer. Down here in Chile, I intend to spend the weekend (and most of next week) doing absolutely nothing but reading, relaxing, and riding horseback with friends around our new 1,000+ acre farm. I’m

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Guest post: the last lemming

December 22, 2011 Toronto, Canada [Editor’s note: Simon’s close friend Craig Ballantyne, now editor of the Early to Rise publication, is filling in today while Simon storms the new farm in Chile.] If you’re like Simon and I and you spend any time at all reading the daily news headlines, it undoubtedly feels

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Your bank is not safe

December 21, 2011 Santiago, Chile Let’s speak plainly.  If you are in the United States or Western Europe, chances are incredibly high that your bank is simply not safe. In other words, your money is at risk. Big time. Let’s review some of the chief concerns: 1) A black box of assets Banking

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The unpaid spies in the financial system

December 20, 2011 Santiago, Chile Here’s a quick crash course in how the intelligence business works these days.  Despite the Hollywood mystique of suave, womanizing, pun-dropping men of mystery flitting around the world, it’s much more mundane. In reality, government operatives from a host of three-letter agencies are working to develop large networks

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Here’s the good news: You’re not Bank of America

December 19, 2011 Santiago, Chile Ten years ago, Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill coined the term “BRICs” to lump together a group of large, rapidly-growing economies that we all know well: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. True to his thesis at the time, growth and development in these countries has left the rest of

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They don’t know what they’re talking about

December 16, 2011 Santiago, Chile It’s done. Yesterday afternoon, after years of searching, months of preparation, and weeks of stress, my wonderful partners and I closed on a gorgeous farm in central Chile, about 2 1/2 hours south of Santiago. The land is over 1,000 acres of productive crops, plentiful water, mountainous horse

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The most obvious trade in precious metals since silver went parabolic in March

Date: December 15, 2011 Reporting From: Manila, Philippines [Editor’s note: Sovereign Man Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in for Simon today.] Earlier this year, when silver went parabolic, rising from $30 to $50 in a matter of weeks, I issued an alert saying I’d put on a short-term bearish trade, using call

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Guest post: So long; thanks for all the stress

Date: December 14, 2011 Reporting From: London, England [Editor’s note: Simon’s friend Tim Price is a delightfully witty fund manager in the UK, one of the few free-thinking individuals in all of institutional finance. His recent thoughts below on the euro debacle, gold, and hyperinflation are some of the best ever written on the topics.] “Helmut Schlesinger, the Bundesbank

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I couldn’t believe this happened

December 13, 2011 Santiago Chile Something incredibly unusual happened yesterday– I was interviewed by a popular radio program broadcast by a -very- mainstream media outlet. This is unusual for a number of reasons; we receive countless interview requests… but I almost always turn them down. I don’t particularly care to draw attention to

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The most powerful force in the world

Date: December 12, 2011 Reporting From: Talca, Chile We’ve spent a wonderful weekend at the farm in Chile watching the harvest of our latest blueberry crop. As I write this, there are 52-workers walking up and down the rows of trees picking fruit… and it’s quite an interesting business. Blueberry trees mature and hit

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One alarming indicator from China

[Editor’s note: Sovereign Man’s Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in today while Simon spends a few days with designers and engineers at the farm in Chile. More on those developments soon.] For a few decades now, the Communist Party in China has had an implicit social and political contract with the

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Finding prosperity through the ‘Great Equalizer’

[Editor’s note: Simon’s close friend Craig Ballantyne, now editor of the Early to Rise publication, is filling in today while Simon sits in boring meetings with his Chilean attorneys.] Imagine being a recently divorced mother of two young women who were about to enter the expensive American college system, and yet your job

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A very subtle form of theft

Say what you want about him, but Bernie Madoff was a guy who knew how to keep the party going. For years, he ran one of the largest private-sector Ponzi schemes in history and always heeded the golden rule of financial scams: make sure your inflows are greater than your outflows. He was

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Guess who’s willing to cut corners?

December 2, 2011 Santiago, Chile Last night I had some close friends over for dinner and a few bottles of Chile native Carmenere wine. A lot of the conversation focused on food– we’re all very conscious about what we put in our bodies and tend to reject the garbage that passes for food

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