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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
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.