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Sometimes you have to marvel at the absurdity of the financial universe in which we live. On one side of the Atlantic, we have the United States of America, which triggered yet another debt ceiling disaster last Thursday when the US government’s maximum allowable debt reset to just over $20 trillion. Of course,
Last night a good friend of mine came over for dinner. He’s originally from Poland, and growing up there he heard a lot of bizarre stories about what it was like during the Nazi invasion and World War II. In 1939, even as 1.5 million German soldiers prepared to invade, the general mood
Today I’m going to introduce you to my friend Ben, easily one of the most unique, intelligent people I know. I first met Ben at my summer Liberty and Entrepreneurship camp several years ago. He had recently dropped out of Harvard after winning the prestigious Peter Thiel fellowship, which has an incredibly competitive
It happened again– another spying scandal in the Land of the Free. Yesterday Wikileaks released 8,761 CIA documents detailing the agency’s hacking of smart phones, routers, computers, and even televisions. These files reveal that the CIA can and has hacked devices that were supposedly secure– iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. The documents further
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Tim Price, manager of the VT Price Value Fund and frequent Sovereign Man contributor.] It was at the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999 that The Onion famously satirized the epically irrational stock market: “Anabaena, a photosynthesizing, nitrogen-fixing algae with 1999 revenues estimated at $0
A few weeks ago, one of our Europe-based Total Access members reached out to ask us about a bank account he was considering for his new business. This is important stuff. As I’ve written before, most people spend more time thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner than even considering whether
Probably around the time I was 12 years old, my parents opened up a bank account on my behalf. Decades later, even though 99% of my assets are outside of the United States, I still maintain a small balance at that bank. I appear to be suffering from some sort of bizarre financial
[Editor’s Note: Peter K, the chief analyst of Sovereign Man’s private investment division, is filling in for Simon today.] I’m visiting my brother in Indonesia right now. Being a good host, he was fixing us vodka martinis, when he realized he ran out of olives. Both of his drivers had finished for the
It’s my usual custom whenever I land at a major airport to stop by the rental car counters and inquire how much it costs to rent a vehicle. For me this is a sort of informal, albeit imperfect, economic indicator. High prices suggest strong demand from plenty of business travelers and tourists, which
I’ve written before a number of times about the long laundry list of reasons why I base myself and most of my business operations in Chile. I could go on forever about this, but in short the country presents an exceptional mix of business, investment, and lifestyle opportunities that are extremely difficult to
In 1927, US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” This quote is enshrined at the Internal Revenue Service, and it’s a rallying cry for people who constantly argue for higher taxes. Almost everyone completely misunderstands what he meant. First of all, tax
In a scathing editorial published in the Wall Street Journal today, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, blasted US banks, saying that they still lacked sufficient capital to withstand a major crisis. Kashkari makes a great analogy. When you’re applying for a mortgage or business loan, sensible banks
About 20 years ago when I was still a cadet at West Point, my economics professor organized a class trip to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The part of the trip that I remember most was touring the Fed’s high security vault, 80 feet below street level beneath the bank’s main
If you’ve been a reader of this letter for any length of time, you may have noticed that I try to spend my weekends and free time at our farms in Chile. I’m still on the road at least 6 months out of the year and travel to 30-40 different countries annually. But
There are lots of famous investors and hedge fund managers who are legendary stock-pickers. Warren Buffet is a great example. Others are hard-core quantitative analysts who build complex trading algorithms. Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, is neither. He’s a macro investor whose fortune was built on an uncanny ability to