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April 16, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Here’s a guy you want to bet on– Li Ka-Shing. Li is reportedly the richest person in Asia with a net worth well in excess of $30 billion, much of which he made being a shrewd property investor. Li Ka-Shing was investing in mainland China back
April 15, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Among all the great stories and conversations passed down from the ages, probably my favorite is one from the ancient historian Lucius Cassius Dio about Roman emperor Caracalla. Caracalla ruled in the second century AD, and he was notorious for bankrupting the Roman treasury and waging
April 14, 2014 Buenos Aires, Argentina Two bright white eyes looked at me inquisitively through the small hatch in the nondescript metal door. I quickly glanced around the dark, empty streets of the Palermo district in Buenos Aires and whispered the password. The door clanked open, revealing a small antechamber and a phone
[Editor’s note: This column was written by Sovereign Man Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose] Earlier in the year I published a piece, setting out why I thought a weaker Australian dollar was inevitable. In light of the recent bounce in the Australian dollar, some people have asked me about it. My views have
April 12, 2014 Buenos Aires, Argentina Two. Billion. Hours. That’s how much time people in the Land of the Free waste each year preparing and filing their tax forms to the IRS– roughly 13 hours for each of the ~150 million individual returns filed. And if you’re doing your own taxes this weekend,
April 10, 2014 Bali, Indonesia [Editor’s Note: Sovereign Man’s Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in for Simon today.] In a speech at the Boao Forum for Asia on Hainan Island today, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced a significant step toward the opening of China’s capital markets. In short, it will soon
April 9, 2014 Santiago, Chile Imagine that your country and banking system are so broke that you have to receive approval from a special committee just to send your own money to your kids who are away at university… Crazy, right? But that’s exactly what’s going on in Cyprus. And it all happened
April 8, 2014 Santiago, Chile Pop quiz: how much do you weigh in kilograms? If you live in just about every country on the planet, you know the answer immediately. But if you live in the United States, you’re probably pulling out a calculator right now. That’s because the US is one of
April 7, 2014 Santiago, Chile Over the weekend, Nigeria’s government made an accounting adjustment in how it calculates its GDP statistics. By changing the base-year in GDP calculations from 1990 to 2010, Nigeria increased the reported size of its economy by 89% over the weekend. So with a stroke of a pen, the
April 3, 2014 Santiago, Chile Buying movie tickets online hardly seems like an earth shattering concept. The idea has been around for at least a decade or more, especially if you’re from North America or Europe. But in parts of Latin America, they’re still working out the kinks. And that created an opportunity.
April 2, 2014 Santiago, Chile I’m really humbled and grateful for all the emails from well-wishers who wanted to know if we were OK. In case you hadn’t heard, there was a pretty massive earthquake yesterday evening in northern Chile off the coast of Iquique near the Peruvian border. According to the University
April 1, 2014 Santiago, Chile In an absolutely astounding announcement today, Janet Yellen made a stern and heartfelt apology for 100 years of asset bubbles, depressions, recessions, panics, banking crises, and all-around inflation caused by the Federal Reserve. Flanked on both sides by former Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Paul Volker,
March 31, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile There’s nothing like a nice cup of reality first thing on Monday morning. If you’ve been a reader for any length of time, you know one of the things I periodically do is scan headlines for phrases like “record high” or “all time high”. The results
March 28, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile How do you define wealth? Most people think of wealth as represented by numbers on a bank account statement. That’s not really what wealth is, however. Having lots of ‘money’ doesn’t equate to being wealthy. It only means you have a large quantity of paper currency
March 27, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Today just happens to be the 160th anniversary of Britain and France’s declaration of war on Russia in what would eventually become known as the Crimean War. Part 1. At the time, Russia was a rising power. By the 1850s, Tsar Nicholas I had expanded Russia’s
