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Reporting from Sydney, Australia Switzerland is the place that has traditionally stood above all the rest in its reputation for financial stability. Why? Because the currency was well-managed, the banking system was sound, and the country had a long tradition of treating capital well. Over the last few years, however, these advantages have
April 15, 2013 Sydney, Australia Somewhere, Paul Krugman is smiling. The Nobel Prize winning economist, whose brilliant ideas include: spending your way out of recession borrowing your way out of debt conjuring unprecedented amounts of currency out of thin air without consequence staging a false flag alien invasion of planet Earth is perhaps
April 11, 2013 London, England [Editor’s note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in while Simon is viewing agricultural property today.] These are certainly days of miracle and wonder. Well, of absurd and extraordinary financial experimentation, at any rate. Last week, for example, saw the
April 10, 2013 Santiago, Chile A few days ago, Italian authorities stopped a man who was making his way across the border into Switzerland with his wife and three children. They searched his car and found, literally, a ton of gold bars hidden in a floorboard storage compartment. Needless to say, the gold
Though Australia’s national balance sheet is comparatively quite strong, the government has been running at a net deficit for years… and they’re under intense pressure to balance the budget. The good news is that Australia now has a goodly number of investor-friendly immigration programs designed to bring productive foreigners into the country, similar
Have you ever done something really stupid, just because you were in love? Something you look back on and cringe, thinking “why on earth did I do that?” Of course. Who hasn’t? Fear. Love. Panic. Exuberance. Jealousy. Desire. These emotions have tremendous influence over human behavior. And when they kick in, they skew
Secret. Dirty. Sham. Shadowy. Illicit. Fake. Covert. Questionable. These are typically the words used to describe the world of offshore asset protection in mainstream media. The classic presumption is that if you go offshore– foreign bank account, overseas safety deposit box, foreign trust, foreign corporation, etc.– then you MUST be doing something wrong.
Reporting from Santiago, Chile One would think that certain truths are obvious by now. It should be obvious, for example, that there are consequences to living beyond your means. It should be obvious that there are consequences to a long history of spending unsustainably and accumulating mountains of debt. And it should be
To anyone paying attention, reality is now painfully obvious. These bankrupt, insolvent governments have just about run out of fingers to plug the dikes. And history shows that, once this happens, governments fall back on a very limited playbook: 1. Direct confiscation As Cyprus showed us, bankrupt governments are quite happy to plunder
[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 from London, England.] Like Lehman Brothers before it, Cyprus may well come to be seen not so much as the cause of further crisis but as yet another
Reporting from Santiago, Chile Sometimes I wake up and I’m just astounded at how quickly things are unraveling. Just look at a few big picture points: The Russians are now wagging their fingers at Europe, comparing the EU to the Soviet Union for trying to plunder Cypriot bank accounts. This on the heels
Reporting from Santiago, Chile In 1729, that Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels fame) penned a famous satirical essay from England entitled “A Modest Proposal.” It’s still famous to this day as mandatory reading in many a high school literature class. As you may recall, Swift addresses the problem of the ultra-depressed Irish economy
[Editor’s note: Tim Price, Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management and frequent Sovereign Man contributor is filling in from London, England while Simon is touring agricultural property today.] If there was ever a policy manual on how to deal with recession, the Fed and ECB’s copies have fallen out of the ugly
Reporting from Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile As you no doubt have heard by now, the government of Cyprus announced Saturday morning (when the banks were closed) that they would impose a ‘levy’ on bank deposits. Originally they announced levies of 9.9% for accounts above 100,000 euros, and 6.7% for accounts below 100,000 euros.
March 15, 2013 Santiago, Chile Earlier in the week, I wrote to you about an Argentine car rental agency that had started accepting Bitcoins as a means to bypass local capital controls. We received a lot of questions about the article, the most common of which was “What in the world is a