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October 21, 2010 Hong Kong, SAR I’m seeing some things on the ground here in Hong Kong that are the first signs of a coming dollar crash. We’ve talked before about how the global financial system is based on enormous flows of capital– trillions of dollars flow from one country to another, from
October 20, 2010 Hong Kong, SAR Something really interesting happened today that I want to share with you. I’m here in Hong Kong on a bit of business– the Hong Kong monetary authority has made some recent changes to its regulations and I wanted to put some boots on the ground to investigate
October 19, 2010 Hong Kong SAR The business class cabins on Cathay Pacific’s 747s jumbo jets have a unique configuration– the seats are fully flat (very comfortable for a long flight) and laid out at a 45 degree angle in order to maximize the number of seats. As such, you get a pretty
October 18, 2010 Harare, Zimbabwe In the late 1800s, English businessman and serial eponymist Cecil Rhodes forcibly colonized a huge chunk of southern Africa on behalf of Great Britain that became known as Rhodesia. Like other African colonies, Rhodesia was harshly segregated. By the mid-1900s, a series of black freedom movements began spreading
October 15, 2010 Harare, Zimbabwe When I told my close friends and family that I was heading back to Zimbabwe, I got the same request over and over: “bring me back some money with a lot of zeros.” With multi-trillion dollar bank notes, Zimbabwe was once the laughing stock of the world economy.
October 14, 2010 Zanzibar, United Republic of Tanzania The selection of books for sale from the street vendor was rather peculiar. Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad series, Warren Buffet investment guides, finance and accounting textbooks, etc. Mostly in English, but many in Swahili. And they were popular. You don’t
October 13, 2010 Zanzibar, United Republic of Tanzania I had a really great conversation with Neil Strauss last night, author of Emergency. If you haven’t checked out the book, I would really encourage you to find it and read it. In his book, Neil tells a very compelling story. Years ago, after a
October 12, 2010 Johannesburg, South Africa As it turns out, vuvuzelas weren’t the only good thing to come out of the World Cup this year. In 2008 and 2009, when the rest of the world was careening off a financial cliff, South Africa was kept afloat because of its ‘World Cup stimulus’. Billions
October 11, 2010 Cape Town, South Africa If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to choose one place to live in for the rest of my life, Cape Town would be on a very short list. It’s not that I don’t like other cities– the world is full of
October 8, 2010 Cape Town, Republic of South Africa It’s been several months since I’ve put boots on the African continent. This place changes all the time, and I believe that, country-by-country, it’s probably the most diverse and intriguing continent on earth… constantly teetering between boom and bust. To be clear, most of
October 7, 2010 Cape Town, South Africa On the flight down to South Africa last night, I read a rather pointed article in the FT entitled, “IMF chief warns on exchange rate wars.” Here’s the basic premise: In their fight against the Great Recession, politicians and central bankers around the world have slashed
October 5, 2010 London, England In its ongoing contest to outdo other countries in the global crackdown against productive citizens, British tax authorities recently unveiled their latest series of measures designed to prove one thing without a doubt: Big brother is coming. I should pause for a moment to clarify some important definitions:
October 4, 2010 Vilnius, Lithuania The instability over the last few days was pretty intense… and no, I’m not talking about Ecuador. Over the weekend, somewhere between 1-3 million protestors in France demonstrated against President Nicholas Sarkozy’s plans to reform the broken French pension system– most notably by raising the retirement age from
October 1, 2010 Vilnius, Lithuania Yesterday was an eventful day. I had stayed up most of the prior evening in Kiev with a rather interesting group (including the Ukrainian national Monopoly champion and some folks from the foreign ministry), and in the morning my wonderful friends Sasha and Dasha took me to Boryspol
September 29, 2010 Kiev, Ukraine In our regular conversations, we talk a lot about planting multiple flags to diversify sovereign risk. I’m convinced that governments are the greatest enemy to prosperity, and the way to protect ourselves is to diversify our assets and interests across multiple geographies so that no single government has