August 26, 2015
Spoleto, Italy
It couldn’t be any more beautiful here.
Every year we descend upon the Umbrian countryside here in Italy, about 2 hours northeast of Rome for a retreat.
It’s a time and place reserved to foster relationships with friends, colleagues, and members of our Sovereign Man community, where three generations of the same Italian family take care of us in a beautiful 400 year old villa.
One of the people here is my friend and colleague Tim Price.
You know Tim from his regular contributions to Notes From the Field, and he’s also a successful London-based wealth manager.
Tim and I sat down today in this beautiful and serene environment and talked briefly about the gyrations in global financial markets.
Tim wittily remarked (as he often does) that there’s no better place to be witnessing the collapse of financial markets.
China’s economy is declining rapidly, dragging down global commodity prices, developing nations, and financial markets. That rout has now reached the US as well.
It appears that the can has finally been kicked to the end of the cul-de-sac.
As Tim and I discuss in this video, the financial crisis in 2008 was brought on by too much debt, too much printed money, mispriced risk, and interest rates that were far too low.
In the past seven years, they’ve only managed to increase debt, print even more money, misprice risk even more, and drop interest rates into negative territory.
Looking back it will all seem so obvious. And that financial reckoning may now be upon us.
Take a look and listen from our conversation (we actually made a video recording for a change) from beautiful Spoleto, Italy:
