Category: Trends & News

Last week I wrote an article about the bizarre US tax liabilities of Leo XIV, the new American Pope. The basic idea that, as a US citizen, the Pope is required to file and pay US taxes on his worldwide income… even though he is a head of state, and even though he

Well, that was fast. It only took five days after Moody’s downgrade of the US government’s sovereign credit rating for investors to throw a fit. The result was yesterday’s meltdown trifecta in which ALL three major markets– US stocks, US bonds, and the US dollar– lost significant value. I wrote about this extensively

In the year 1980, a young computer science grad student from the University of Washington named Burrell “Bud” Tribble accepted a job at a hot tech startup you might have heard of: it’s called Apple. Tribble went to work directly for Steve Jobs on Apple’s most ambitious project at the time– the Macintosh.

Nearly 2,000 years ago around the year 75 AD, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch sat down to write his most ambitious work yet– a collection of biographies of the 48 most famous and influential figures of antiquity. It was called Parallel Lives, and this two-volume series covered everyone from the mythical founders of Rome

I still can’t get over the fact that there’s an American pope… and that his friends refer to him as ‘Bob’. Bob. It just makes him seem like a regular dude who’d be drinking a beer and shouting at the umpire at a Cubs game. Something else that makes the new Pope seem

In the year 428 BC, ancient Athenians imposed a special tax called the eisphora that targeted local business investments in the city-state. It was expensive and highly unpopular among investors. And wealthy Athenians simply stopped investing in local businesses to avoid the tax. This is almost an iron-clad lesson of history: whenever governments

One of the most mysterious villains in the history of cinema was the fictitious character ‘Keyser Söze’ from the movie The Usual Suspects. No spoilers here, but there’s a scene where they describe his rise in the criminal underworld. According to the story, Keyser Söze realized that “to be in power, you didn’t

In the early 1300s, the county of Toulouse in southern France was locked in an epic struggle with the Catholic Church over religious freedom. A large group of individuals who called themselves “Good Christians” were sort of proto-Protestants in that they still believed in the basic tenets of Christianity, but they did not

Here are a few stories from the week that caught our eye, all of which highlight the bizarre ways that Western Civilization is sabotaging itself. Canadians screw themselves to spite Trump Canadians are celebrating that Donald Trump is not their new Prime Minister. Of course, he wasn’t on the ballot. But don’t tell

My partner Peter Schiff and I have both been pretty aggressive over the past couple of years in telling our audience that gold companies were deeply undervalued. Our thesis was simple: the price of gold was surging to fresh record highs every couple of months, yet gold companies were languishing at historic lows.

You’ve probably heard the story. As the legend goes, on a late-summer morning in 1929, Joseph Kennedy — patriarch of the famous Kennedy family — was headed into his office in downtown New York City. As he sat for a quick shoe shine, the young boy buffing his shoes, barely a teenager, eagerly

Don Edgar considered himself extremely lucky. It was early in the morning on November 6, 1956, and the World War II veteran turned journalist for Britain’s Daily Express was one of just two reporters invited to witness Britain’s invasion of Egypt. Standing on the bridge of a British warship, Edgar wrote that it

Franklin Roosevelt pressed the red emergency button to stop the elevator on the way down to his private dining room. The King of Saudi Arabia was waiting for him, but the President wanted to smoke a couple of cigarettes first. It was 11:30 in the morning on Valentine’s Day, 1945. World War II

By 1970, US commanders in Vietnam were optimistic that they had “functionally severed” North Vietnamese forces. The generals were particularly boastful about their taking out the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a sprawling network of roads, footpaths, and tunnels through Laos and Cambodia that let North Vietnamese forces move troops and supplies into South Vietnam,