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August 6, 2015 Vilnius Lithuania Here’s a great example of how an important rule that may affect your life gets BURIED within a giant piece of legislation— At first glance the Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015 doesn’t seem like it should have any impact on foreign bank
June 25, 2015 Bali, Indonesia If you’re filling out your FBAR this weekend, here are some things to keep in mind. The FBAR is a disclosure form, not a tax form. So even though it goes to the treasury department, it’s not like there’s any money owed. Nonetheless, this is not something to
May 26, 2015 Santiago, Chile Of all the peculiarities about human nature, one of the most interesting in my opinion is that we’re so resistant to change. Humans simply don’t deal with it well. We tend to root. We find comfort in familiarity. And, even when the familiar becomes unpleasant, we still put
May 15, 2015 New York City Remember all that talk about “taper” last year? After years of conjuring trillions of dollars out of thin air and rapidly expanding its balance sheet, the Federal Reserve promised to end its unprecedented ‘Quantitative Easing’ (QE) programs. In total the Fed’s balance sheet exploded from $800 billion
We have entered a most bizarre and unprecedented age in the financial system where there’s risk in just about everything that we do. Indiscriminately investing in stocks at their all-time highs carries enormous risk, and financial history is unkind to people who fail to learn that lesson. To buy bonds, on the other
May 13, 2015 En route to New York One of the many experiences uniquely endured by Americans is having to confess your sins once a year to the federal government. Specifically, Uncle Sam requires most individuals with foreign bank and financial accounts to fess up and disclose on an annual basis. In fact,
February 23, 2015 Hong Kong In 1494, a 47-year old Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli invented something that was revolutionary. Pacioli was, in fact, a friend and contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, and the two collaborated frequently. So you’re probably guessing that Pacioli was a co-designer in Leonardo’s famed flying machine, or a
February 18, 2015 San Diego, California It’s not very often that you hear a senior government official refer to their economic situation using the word ‘crisis’. Yet with uncharacteristic bluntness of any government official anywhere, at least one senior Chinese government official is sounding the alarm bells. And he would know. Guan Tao
February 16, 2015 En route to the Land of the Free Two years ago, Mr. Chan saw an opportunity. Thanks to tight government control of the Internet, launching a website in China is an intensely bureaucratic affair. It takes much more than just buying a domain and hosting it. In China, you first
February 12, 2015 Puerto Varas, Chile Twenty-seven years ago at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, George H. W. Bush accepted his party’s nomination to run for President of the United States. (This was when he announced Dan Quayle as his running mate, to which Senator John McCain later remarked “I
January 30, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile A member of my staff caught an obscure resolution that was introduced in the US House of Representatives last week—Resolution no. 41. The fact that there was essentially no coverage of this Resolution really shows how the mainstream media is completely turning a blind eye to
January 28, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Last May, Mr. Wang from Hangzhou, China walked into a bank on Jiangpu Street in Nanjing, opened an account, and made a 12 million yuan deposit. The bank was new, but it didn’t look different from any other bank that Mr. Wang had been to. It
January 27, 2015 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile We’ve been very vocal in the past about the importance of holding a portion of your savings at a safe, stable bank offshore. The reasons are numerous: Many foreign banks are much healthier than their Western counterparts who usually have razor-thin capital and tight liquidity. Foreign
Yesterday, the IRS announced the International Data Exchange Service. If you’ve not heard of it, it’s is an outgrowth of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which requires every single bank in the world to get in bed with IRS to share information about customers. We’ve said this over and over, FATCA
December 18, 2014 Santiago, Chile On the morning of September 19, 1873, an excited crowd of people gathered outside the Fourth National Bank in lower Manhattan. It was a wet morning, yet the line continued to grow, stretching across Pine Street down Nassau Street as rain-soaked customers jostled with one another for position.
