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Forget tapering. Forget Ukraine. The largest single risk to the world economy and financial markets right now is China. What’s going on in China reminds me a lot of what I witnessed firsthand when I lived in South Korea in the 1990s, before that economy’s crash in 1998. Just as China now, South
It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that an entire nation was frozen out of its savings… overnight. Cypriots went to bed on Friday thinking everything was fine. By the next morning, they had no way to pay bills or buy food. It’s certainly a chilling reminder of how quickly
March 14, 2014 Ambergris Caye, Belize One of the great things about being a foreigner in developing countries is how easy it is to get access to influential decision-makers. If you’re in the UK or US, for example, the chances of sitting down with the President or Treasury Secretary are almost nil. In
March 14, 2014 Ambergris Caye, Belize One of the key lessons we can take away from history is that the global financial system changes… frequently. In ancient times, Roman coins were used across the region by Romans and non-Romans alike who engaged in trade and commerce. Given how destructively successive Roman governments debased
March 14, 2014 Ambergris Caye, Belize My research team recently passed along a piece of legislation they were looking at called the “ENFORCE the Law Act of 2014.” It immediately piqued my interest… because anytime you see all CAPS in government documents, it signifies some absurd acronym. And the ‘ENFORCE the Law Act’
Nearly four thousand years ago, King Hammurabi of Babylon laid out his eponymous “Hammurabi’s Code”, a series of laws that is still famous to this day. Most people know Hammurabi’s Code as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Yet what few realize is that the code was actually one
March 12, 2014 Roatan, Honduras Deep within the Congo basin along the banks of the Kasai River exist two native peoples– the Lele and the Bushong. The two tribes are practically the same people, separated only by a river. Yet when two anthropologists went to Africa in the early 1950s to study these
March 11, 2014 Caribbean coast, Honduras How’s this for irony– In our modern monetary system, the term ‘fiat currency’ refers to this absurd notion of paper currency that is conjured out of thin air by central bankers and backed by nothing but hollow promises. ‘Fiat’ is a subjunctive conjugation of the Latin verb
March 10, 2014 En route to Honduras Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from an interview with Robin Speronis, the woman in Cape Coral, Florida who Simon wrote about recently that got bullied by the local government simply because she was living off the grid. Simon: So, Robin, you’d been living a
March 5, 2014 En route to Colombia President Obama released his 2015 budget proposal yesterday… and as expected, it contained even more language about his MyRA initiative. As we’ve discussed so many times in the past, IRAs are an irresistible kitty for such a bankrupt government. The US government itself estimates that over
March 5, 2014 En route to Colombia “Putin: Unconstitutional coup is taking place in Ukraine. The U.S halted military cooperation and trade negotiations with Russia” That’s the headline from a Beijing newspaper– and no surprise that it leans slightly to the Russian side. The article goes on: “Russian president Putin said on 4th
March 4, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Warren Buffet sees a different America than I do. I would wager he sees a different America than untold millions of people do too. And with due respect to the kind-hearted Mr. Buffet, who is undoubtedly an accomplished and savvy investor, the man has been a
March 4, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile This is just too funny… not in that ‘ha ha’ funny way, but a very ironic funny. It’s British humor, folks. The White House announced on Saturday that President Obama had a 90 minute phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. Now,
March 3, 2014 London, England [Editors note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in for Simon today.] A few weeks ago, William White (former economist at the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, and Bank of International Settlements) made a frank admission.
February 28, 2014 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile “Hey I just wanted to let you know, a guy from the local government was here today…” That was one of the first phone calls I received from the manager of this place just a few days after I had taken over this farm a couple