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In 2007 John McAfee explained in Fast Company, “Success for me, is can you wake up in the morning and feel like a twelve year old?” However, that was right before he lost 95% of his net worth. He explains in Robert Frank’s book, The High-Beta Rich, that he was living through a second childhood, wasting money on
Did you know that, according to Capgemini and the Royal Bank of Canada’s latest World Wealth Report, there are now more millionaires in Asia than North America…? An estimated 3.37 million individuals in the Asia-Pacific region have a liquid net worth of over US$1 million. That compares to 3.35 million in North America. The same
July 25, 2012 London, England For the last two weeks here in the UK, TV stations have been running a documentary series called “Bank of Dave“, in which down-to-earth businessman Dave Fishwick attempts to establish his own bank. The premise sounds plausible: offer depositors 5% interest (as opposed to zero), and lend to
July 16, 2012 Hong Kong A few days ago in Indonesia’s Lampung province, I was following a sprightly Chinese woman, well into her 70s, as she showed me around her thriving home appliances and furniture shop. It was an amazing thing to see. The three-story shop-house was both the family home, and business premises. Yet every
June 29, 2012 Tel Aviv, Israel This week may very well go down as ‘connect the dots’ week. Things have been moving so quickly, so let’s step back briefly and review the big picture from the week’s events: 1) After weeks… months… even years of posturing and denial, Spain and Cyprus became the fourth and fifth
June 11, 2012 London It’s common in financial markets for investors to conflate what we call ‘volatility’ with what we term ‘risk’. They are not exactly the same thing. More specifically, volatility is an inevitable by-product of investing in a financial market. As JP Morgan (the man, not the bank) once said: markets
May 25, 2012 Yangon, Burma If you’re sick and tired of all the doom and gloom that pervades the US and Europe, and should your personal circumstances allow, I unreservedly recommend that you hop on a plane and go and check out Burma. This is a rare good news story, and it may very well
May 24, 2012 Lake Tahoe, USA Yesterday was my lucky day. While hiking in the middle of nowhere around Lake Tahoe, I literally stumbled onto a 1-ounce US silver eagle coin, 1996 issue. It was just lying there on the ground without a soul in sight. The coin was pretty muddy, but I managed to
May 22, 2012 Los Angeles, USA This week, the universally stupid brainchild of US Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey known as the Ex-PATRIOT Act inched a bit closer towards becoming law. ‘Ex-PATRIOT’ is an absurd acronym that stands for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy”. I call it the
May 18, 2012 Undisclosed location, USA When you think about it, it’s easy to understand why financial markets and media have been so fixated on the Facebook IPO. The creation of so many billionaires and millionaires overnight is certainly cause for good cheer, and given the debacle in Europe coupled with America’s looming
May 4, 2012 Santiago, Chile Tomorrow morning, an expected 30,000 faithful Berkshire Hathaway shareholders will file into the CenturyLink Center in downtown Omaha to hear their leader wax philosophically on just about every topic imaginable. You have to give credit where credit is due: Warren Buffett is damn good at picking stocks and
April 18, 2012 Madrid, Spain The US Passport Act of 1926 is an obscure piece of legislation that was enacted decades ago when the idea of passports starting catching fire around the world. Subsequently absorbed into US Code Title 22, the law was originally intended to authorize and issue passports for US citizens
April 10, 2012 Singapore The flight from Bangkok to Singapore is a quick 2-hours south down the Malay peninsula… though it might as well be 2-years given their differences; Singapore and Thailand are about as distinct as Switzerland and India– it’s yin & yang. Order vs. Chaos. Safety vs. Insanity. I spend a
Gold Standard:Are there Currencies Backed by Gold? AUTHOR PUBLISHED If you’re here, you likely know your dollar, euro, or pound sterling is little more than paper (or digital) money… And you know, instinctively, that this is not a good situation for your hard-earned cash. Why? Because these currencies are not backed by a
March 22, 2012 Santiago, Chile If you’re a US taxpayer, you’ll want to heed the following before dropping off your 1040 this year. You see, in 2010, Congress and President Obama passed a series of new rules known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA. FATCA affects every US taxpayer who
