SEARCH
October 29, 2010 Colombo, Sri Lanka I want to start off this missive with an important announcement: Sovereign Man will be hosting its inaugural comprehensive offshore workshop from February 18-20, 2011 in Panama City, Panama. This is something that I’m very excited about, and I’m devoting a lot of time and attention to
October 28, 2010 Colombo, Sri Lanka In ancient Sanskrit, the name means “venerable island,” and the Arabs used to refer to it as “Serendib” for serendipity. Sri Lankans tend to agree– they find their small island of 20 million to be littered with good fortune, and many foreigners will concur. Sri Lanka is
October 27, 2010 Trivandrum, Kerala State, India In life, you can either be an Elvis person or a Beatles person. I’m an Elvis man myself. Fortunately, so was Ashok, the brakeman on train #6302. I serendipitously ended up meeting Ashok by mistake– I boarded his train as it was literally pulling away from
October 25, 2010 Cochin, Kerala State, India India is, without doubt, one of the most intriguing countries in the world; the culture, the food, the history, the mysticism, and the beautiful landscape all make for a very compelling place to visit. From an economic perspective, it’s also very compelling. We all know the
October 22, 2010 Mumbai, Maharashtra, India Usually when flying from east to west on long-hauls, flights leave in the daytime and arrive a bit later in the day due to changes in the time zone. For example, you might leave London at 12pm and arrive in Miami at 4pm even though it’s a
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