Category: Trends & News

July 28, 2014 Kharkiv, Ukraine It was a different world in 1983. Michael Jackson invented the Moonwalk. Return of the Jedi opened in theaters across the world. IBM released its most advanced personal computer yet– the XT, with a standard 10 megabyte hard drive. And after nearly a decade of eratic swings and

July 25, 2014 Prague, Czech Republic Less than four weeks after starting his new job, Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela already has a serious challenge to deal with: empty grocery shelves. This is largely a self-inflicted wound that was bound to happen. Fresh on the heels of his victory in May, the then

July 23, 2014 Barcelona, Spain Sadly today I am reporting to you yet another development that seems as if we are all living within the pages of Ayn Rand’s seminal work Atlas Shrugged. You may recall from the book that John Galt, the enigmatic protagonist, started off as a young engineer at the

July 22, 2014 Andorra Leopold Kohr was a rather obscure Austrian economist from the early 20th century who spent the better part of his career railing against the ‘cult of bigness’. Kohr’s fundamental premise was simple: Big doesn’t work. Big corporations. Big governments. Big countries. There are just too many problems from size.

July 21, 2014 London, England [Editor’s note: This missive was penned by Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in the UK and frequent Sovereign Man contributor.] They call them ‘junk bonds’ for a reason. They now constitute an offence against linguistic decency: ‘high yield’ no longer even is. Consider the

July 17, 2014 Malaga, Spain Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 80s, my parents enrolled me in organized basketball when I was around 9 or 10 years old. We weren’t really any good… just a bunch of kids from the Nintendo generation who would have rather been playing Jordan

July 16, 2014 Malaga, Spain If you ever find yourself vacationing in the western Pacific, I highly recommend swinging by Yap Island, home of one of the most bizarre forms of money in history. Over a thousand years ago, natives would mine enormous chunks of limestone and carve them into gigantic circular discs.

July 15, 2014 Malaga, Spain Exactly 70 years ago to the day, hundreds of delegates from 44 nations were busy at work in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire creating a brand new financial system. World War II had just ended. Europe was in ruin. And since the US was simultaneously the largest economy in

July 14, 2014 Istanbul, Turkey It’s been over a year since the banking system in Cyprus officially went bust. On Friday, March 15, 2013, practically everyone in the country went to bed thinking that everything was just fine. Many had probably gone to the bank that very day to do business, or logged

July 10, 2014 En route to Batumi, Georgia The first recorded sovereign default was in the 4th century BC when ten Greek cities failed to honor loans from the temple of Delos. Most of the borrowers could not pay back what they owed and the temple took an 80% loss on its principal.

July 9, 2014 Erbil, Iraq It’s been nearly 1,000 years since Iraq had some positive momentum. Back then, Europe had plunged into the Dark Ages where intellectual and economic progress all but halted. Baghdad, on the other hand, was the most exciting, cosmopolitan city in the world. It was the capital of the

July 8, 2014 Erbil, Iraq More than eleven years ago, I was among tens of thousands of troops baking in the hot sun of the Kuwaiti desert waiting for George W. Bush to make his ‘decision’. Of course it was total baloney. The decision to invade Iraq had already been made. They just