Category: Trends & News

[Editor’s note: Our Chief Investment Strategist Tim Staermose is filling in for Simon today from Yangon, Myanmar.] Since so much of Asia is on holiday for the Lunar New Year, I decided to travel to Myanmar to check out how the economy is developing. Myanmar was once the wealthiest economy in Southeast Asia.

In 578 AD, a Korean immigrant named Shigemitsu Kongo made his way to Japan at the invitation of the royal family. Buddhism was on the rise in Japan at the time; though it had only been introduced a few decades prior, the Empress consort had been actively encouraging the adoption of Buddhism across

It’s news that seems ripped from the pages of The Onion. Or perhaps Atlas Shrugged. But incredibly enough it’s actually true: earlier this week, Congress proposed a new law authorizing the US Postal Service to provide banking and financial services. It’s called the “Providing Opportunities for Savings, Transactions, and Lending” Act, abbreviated as…

Even before his coronation in 1626, King Charles I of England was almost bankrupt. His predecessors King James and Queen Elizabeth had run the royal treasury down to almost nothing. Costly war and military folly had taken its toll. The crown had simply wasted far too much money, and brought in too little.

In case you missed it, yesterday we alerted you that the United States government has now officially accumulated $19 trillion in debt. This time it took them just 427 days of printing to pile on this last trillion dollars, compared to the over 75,000 days it took to rack up the first trillion

On October 22, 1981, the national debt in the United States of America hit $1 trillion for the first time in history. It had taken the US federal government over two centuries to reach that mark. And in that period, America had won its independence and built a nation from scratch. How Much

Let’s take a moment to compare the world today to before the Global Financial Crisis struck roughly eight years ago. In this short period of time, US federal government debt has DOUBLED. The Federal Reserve now holds $2.4 trillion of that debt, up from $479 billion. Interest rates, which were between 2-4%, are

On August 24 in the year 79 AD, one of the most famous natural disasters in history struck the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii, and its surrounding area. We have an eye-witness account from Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, whose letter to Roman historian Tacitus vividly describes how the eruption of Mount Vesuvius rained

In 2014, the Journal of Neuroscience published the results of a unique study that probed deep into human emotion. Two Dutch scientists had conducted an experiment in which they exposed test subjects to a wide range of scenarios to evoke some of the most primal human emotions– joy, anger, etc. Subjects were hooked

Chances are you’ve never heard of William White. You might have heard of the organization that he used to manage—the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). The BIS is often called the central bank of central banks; their role is essentially to facilitate international financial transactions among the world’s central banks. So they are

If you believe the official propaganda, no other nation in the history of the world has advanced the cause of humanity more than North Korea. According to the North Korean Ministry of Truth, their great nation has cured cancer, ebola, AIDS, SARS, MERS, and much more. Now they’re saving the world again, this

Julius Caesar was kind of a deadbeat. The guy was in debt up to his eyeballs, and had borrowed so much money to finance his rise to power that he threatened to skip town forever if he lost an election. Back in Caesar’s day, interest rates in Rome were about 12%. In ancient