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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
March 21, 2012 Santiago, Chile This is something out of an Orwellian science fiction movie. The Italian tax authorities are now field testing a new system called ‘redditometro’, a database that automatically collects and analyzes taxpayers’ tax data vs. spending data based on automated collection of credit card and banking information. For example,
March 20, 2012 Santiago, Chile Quietly, and with little fanfare, President Obama signed a “National Defense Resources Preparedness” Executive Order on Friday. As the name suggests, the order intends to shore up the country’s national defense resources in advance of a national emergency. To be fair, this is not the first time that
March 6, 2012 Caracas, Venezuela With an annual murder rate estimated as high as 67 homicides per every 100,000 inhabitants in his country, Hugo Chavez is about to show the world that he’s tough on crime. At least, the non-governmental kind. Chavez’s government claims that 98% of the homicides in Venezuela involve firearms.
March 2, 2012 Santiago, Chile When I was a kid, I remember watching that Schoolhouse Rock cartoon about how a bill becomes a law. That single cartoon probably brainwashed three generations of children into believing in the checks and balances fantasy of the US federal government. The reality is what we see everywhere
Date: March 1, 2012 Reporting From: Santiago, Chile Earlier this week, the British government announced that Barclays PLC, one of Britain’s oldest and largest banks, was facing an $800 million penalty for engaging in a tax avoidance scheme. Barclays had been exploiting loopholes in legislation in order to avoid paying a higher tax
February 28, 2012 London, England [Editor’s note: Tim Price, a frequent Sovereign Man contributor and Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in London, is filling in for Simon today.] In December last year, the poet Alice Oswald withdrew from the TS Eliot poetry prize on the grounds that the prize was being
February 27, 2012 Talca, Chile Banking privacy is dead. Completely, totally dead. Murdered, really. The US government is the assailant, and FATCA is the murder weapon. We’ve talked about this a few times before– FATCA is the heinously insidiously piece of legislation that the Honorable Barrack Hussein Obama passed into law in 2010
February 24, 2012 Santiago, Chile I want to start off today’s letter by thanking the 120+ folks who’ve made the journey down to Chile over the past two weekends to break bread on the farm. Last weekend’s event was a real delight, and I’m looking forward to tonight’s festivities with the new group.
February 22, 2012 Santiago, Chile “[T]he more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” Benito Mussolini Grand Fascist Council Report, 1929 When I was a kid, the morning announcements at my taxpayer-funded public school dragged on for a good 15 or 20 minutes. They
February 14, 2012 Talca, Chile One of the local papers here in Chile ran an interesting story a few days ago about the number of young Spanish immigrants coming to Chile in search of work. Fed up with the ridiculously high unemployment rate in Spain, and tired of being shut out of every
February 13, 2012 London, England [Editor’s note: Professional money manager Tim Price is filling in for Simon today from London. His thoughts below on gold, bonds, and the false pretext of investing in equities is delightfully insightful.] For value investors of a certain age (e.g. mine), discovering that Warren Buffett could be wrong
