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October 17, 2013 Santiago, Chile “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” The dialogue above is from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. It’s often attributed to Mark Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or misquoted as something like “At first you go bankrupt
October 15, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile Apparently the IRS has fallen on hard times in light of all this government shutdown and sequestration nonsense. Too bad. According to a recent report from the Treasury Department, ‘enforcement revenue’ at the IRS has fallen for the second straight year. Enforcement revenue is what the
October 14, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile It’s become almost cliche these days to point out how many governments are broke beyond belief. In Japan, where the country’s debt level already exceeds 200% of GDP, the government has to finance 46% of its budget by issuing more debt. In the United States, the
October 10, 2013 London, England [Editor’s note: Tim Price, frequent Sovereign Man contributor and Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in the UK is filling in for Simon today.] Despite nearly $17 trillion reasons, there are investors stupid enough to believe that debt issued by the world’s largest debtor country (i.e. US
October 9, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Pencahue, Chile In August 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson walked into the main branch of Kreditbanken bank in central Stockholm, Sweden and attempted to rob the place at gunpoint. He failed miserably. When the police arrived in short order, Olsson opened fire and injured one of the cops. This
October 7, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Pencahue, Chile “Diminishing Superpower” This was the headline streaking across the weekend edition of the Jakarta Globe, one of the largest newspapers in Indonesia. The photo beneath was of Barack Obama, his lips pursed and eyes steeled as if he was fighting back tears. Or perhaps staring
October 4, 2013 Santiago, Chile It takes a lot of courage to go against the crowd. Whether in investing, or acknowledging that your country is heading towards an epic fiscal crisis, it isn’t easy to stand alone… especially when everyone else is betting the other way. Have you ever noticed, for example, that
October 2, 2013 Santiago, Chile Human beings have an innate desire to thrive. And there are few things more soul crushing than to sit idle and unemployed during one’s most formative and energetic years. Traveling across Europe this summer, I was astonished at the economic decimation in places like Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, and
October 1, 2013 Santiago, Chile Try this experiment. Ring up your credit card company at the end of this month. Tell them that you and your spouse can’t seem to reach an agreement about how to allocate your monthly budget. So in the meantime, you have been forced to shutdown your household… but
September 30, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Pencahue, Chile Last night I was speaking to a long-time mentor. And he’s unfortunately in very poor health at the moment. Most of his condition is a result of lifestyle choices over the past several decades. Too much junk food. Too much excess. Never enough discpiline or
September 25, 2013 Sovereign Valley Farm, Pencahue, Chile It goes without saying that parents want the best for their children… and that each generation wishes the next to be even more prosperous and successful. For the most part, this has been the historical pattern since the Industrial Revolution; every successive generation has enjoyed
September 23, 2013 London, England [Editor’s Note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in for Simon today.] “This took guts.” – Comment by Steven Ricchiuto of Mizuho Securities in response to the Federal Reserve’s surprise decision to refrain from “tapering” its $85 billion
September 20, 2013 Santiago, Chile One of those generally accepted truths that most people believe is that banks are safe. We seem to be told this for our entire lives… that banks, in their grandiose buildings and marble floors, are veritable rivers of money. We’re also told that bankers are conservative fiduciary stewards,
September 19, 2013 En route to Chile “Truth. noun. The quality of state of being in accordance with fact or reality.” This is how my dictionary defines truth: it can be ‘fact’. But it can also mean ‘reality’. The people who control the system have figured this out– if they can change someone’s
September 17, 2013 En route to the United States In mathematics, the term ‘linearity’ describes a relationship in which the rate of change for a variable is constant. If you’re driving from Paris to Frankfurt at 100 kilometers per hour, then this is a linear system– your rate of change (speed) is constant.
