Category: Trends & News

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… and now for the bad news

In the late 1760s and early 1770s, the government of France was in a deep panic. They had recently suffered a disastrous and costly defeat in the Seven Years War, and the national budget was a complete mess. France had spent most of the previous century as the world’s dominant superpower, and the

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Nine years later, Greece is still in a debt crisis…

Sometimes you have to marvel at the absurdity of the financial universe in which we live. On one side of the Atlantic, we have the United States of America, which triggered yet another debt ceiling disaster last Thursday when the US government’s maximum allowable debt reset to just over $20 trillion. Of course,

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What do these CEOs know that we don’t?

Last night a good friend of mine came over for dinner. He’s originally from Poland, and growing up there he heard a lot of bizarre stories about what it was like during the Nazi invasion and World War II. In 1939, even as 1.5 million German soldiers prepared to invade, the general mood

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How one Silicon Valley entrepreneur lost his faith in the system

Today I’m going to introduce you to my friend Ben, easily one of the most unique, intelligent people I know. I first met Ben at my summer Liberty and Entrepreneurship camp several years ago. He had recently dropped out of Harvard after winning the prestigious Peter Thiel fellowship, which has an incredibly competitive

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The most shocking revelation from the CIA spying scandal

It happened again– another spying scandal in the Land of the Free. Yesterday Wikileaks released 8,761 CIA documents detailing the agency’s hacking of smart phones, routers, computers, and even televisions. These files reveal that the CIA can and has hacked devices that were supposedly secure– iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. The documents further

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Sock puppets and vomiting ghosts

[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Tim Price, manager of the VT Price Value Fund and frequent Sovereign Man contributor.] It was at the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999 that The Onion famously satirized the epically irrational stock market: “Anabaena, a photosynthesizing, nitrogen-fixing algae with 1999 revenues estimated at $0

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Here’s an example of a bank you want to avoid

A few weeks ago, one of our Europe-based Total Access members reached out to ask us about a bank account he was considering for his new business. This is important stuff. As I’ve written before, most people spend more time thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner than even considering whether

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Finding a safe bank that actually pays a solid interest rate

Probably around the time I was 12 years old, my parents opened up a bank account on my behalf. Decades later, even though 99% of my assets are outside of the United States, I still maintain a small balance at that bank. I appear to be suffering from some sort of bizarre financial

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Here’s one alternative, but it’s extremely unpopular

It’s my usual custom whenever I land at a major airport to stop by the rental car counters and inquire how much it costs to rent a vehicle. For me this is a sort of informal, albeit imperfect, economic indicator. High prices suggest strong demand from plenty of business travelers and tourists, which

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The biggest transformation story in the world

I’ve written before a number of times about the long laundry list of reasons why I base myself and most of my business operations in Chile. I could go on forever about this, but in short the country presents an exceptional mix of business, investment, and lifestyle opportunities that are extremely difficult to

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Boy was I wrong about this place…

In 1927, US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” This quote is enshrined at the Internal Revenue Service, and it’s a rallying cry for people who constantly argue for higher taxes. Almost everyone completely misunderstands what he meant. First of all, tax

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Fed president says US banks have “half the equity they need”

In a scathing editorial published in the Wall Street Journal today, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, blasted US banks, saying that they still lacked sufficient capital to withstand a major crisis. Kashkari makes a great analogy. When you’re applying for a mortgage or business loan, sensible banks

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World’s 2nd largest stockpile of gold leaves the United States

About 20 years ago when I was still a cadet at West Point, my economics professor organized a class trip to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The part of the trip that I remember most was touring the Fed’s high security vault, 80 feet below street level beneath the bank’s main

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Yes, money does grow on trees

If you’ve been a reader of this letter for any length of time, you may have noticed that I try to spend my weekends and free time at our farms in Chile. I’m still on the road at least 6 months out of the year and travel to 30-40 different countries annually. But

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