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What’s the dumbest thing you can possibly imagine your government doing? It’s a serious question– think about it for a moment. Now, whatever you come up with, I’m about to present an option that will probably blow it out of the water. This morning, pharmaceutical mega-companies Pfizer and Allergan announced that they were
A friend of mine who’s an equities analyst at a large brokerage firm recently sent out pretty ironic note to all of his private clients. He focuses on the financial sector, so his job is basically to analyze bank stocks and figure out which ones his investors should buy. To determine this, he
After every major financial crisis there’s always a retrospective analysis where we can look back and identify “the top”. Looking back at the tech bubble of the 1990s, for example, all of my friends in technology point to the acquisition of Netscape by AOL for $4.2 billion as the obvious top of the
America is and has always been an extraordinary idea. It espouses the values of liberty, economic freedom, self-reliance, and independence. What’s not to love about that? It’s an idea that resonates within each of us, speaks to our inner humanity and our desire to prosper. The United States is not the first country
Last year, amid all the madness in financial markets, financial historian and strategist Russell Napier joked about creating a “European high-yield capital guarantee fund.” His “high-yield” fund was nothing more than a secure room filled with physical cash, and a guy standing outside with a gun to guard it. As jokes tend to
If you haven’t seen the 2015 Best Picture nominee, The Big Short, I strongly recommend it. The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis’ book which examines how such an extraordinary financial crisis gripped the world in 2008, and the handful of people who saw it coming. The movie opens asking a very
[Editor’s note: Sovereign Man’s Chief Investment Strategist, Tim Staermose, is filling in for Simon today.] One of the wealthiest countries in the world– the place where there are more millionaires per capita than anywhere else on the planet– now has a dirt cheap stock market. It’s Singapore. And right now, the total market
“Prosperity is like a Jenga tower. Take one piece out and the whole thing can fall.” That’s a direct quote from John Williams, the President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank in a speech he gave a few weeks ago. He could have just as easily been talking about propaganda. The Fed,
Maybe it’s greed. Or fear. Or blatant irrationality. But there’s something inside human nature that makes us think unsustainable situations can last forever. One of those has been the meteoric rise of the US dollar, particularly over the last year. The dollar became king once again in 2015, towering over oil prices, gold
The 12.5 hours spent crossing the Pacific on Qantas flight 27 feels like going through a wormhole. The flight departs Sydney, Australia at 12:50pm and arrives to Santiago, Chile the same day at 11:20am. In other words, the plane lands 90 minutes before it departs. When I landed yesterday, the captain came on
Human beings have come up with some crazy ideas for money and finance over the years. Conch shells. Beads. Animal skins. Salt. Rice. All of these were used as a form of money at one time or another. But the strangest by far has got to be the Rai Stones of Yap Island.
Over 4,000 years ago during Sargon the Great’s reign of the Akkadian Empire, it took 8 units of silver to buy one unit of gold. This was a time long before coins. It would be thousands of years before the Lydians in modern day Turkey would invent gold coins as a form of
Every time I come to Viet Nam, I’m always astounded at the incredible growth and opportunity here. This time around I’m reviewing a number of suppliers to buy raw materials from for a new business we’re acquiring in Australia. Just a few years ago those supply contracts would have easily been awarded to
Just stunning. German newspaper Der Spiegel reported yesterday that the Bavarian Banking Association has recommended that its member banks start stockpiling PHYSICAL CASH. Europe, of course, has been battling with negative interest rates for quite some time. What this means is that commercial banks are being charged interest for holding wholesale deposits at
In the middle of a heated battle against my jetlag yesterday, I finally decided to exercise the nuclear option and turn on CNBC in order to stay awake. I figured someone would say something completely ridiculous, and it would get my blood boiling enough to power through the next couple of hours. Within