Yes, There Is Good News!
I’ve been called “The World’s Most Pessimistic Man” and “Mr. Worst-Case Scenario.” But I’m actually an optimist when looking at the long-term future.
I’ve been called “The World’s Most Pessimistic Man” and “Mr. Worst-Case Scenario.” But I’m actually an optimist when looking at the long-term future.
It’s no surprise that Big Brother takes an intense interest in how we interact with our mobile devices.
Your US passport, once a gateway to the world, is now a travel liability. As I pointed out in this article...
One of our clients’ recurring concerns is the long-term viability of the US dollar as the world’s “reserve currency.” I have a simple answer for them:
The dollar is doomed.
In the months and years ahead, you’ll do fine and maybe even get rich if you sell weed edibles or become a video game star. If you own a mall, your golden days have passed.
You may not have noticed, but eyes in the sky were watching when demonstrators marched in American cities last month.
Heads, Big Brother wins. Tails, you lose. That’s the no-win dilemma US citizens who live overseas face when it comes to using a US passport...
You might call it the “curse of good intentions”: an action we take upon ourselves or require others to take in the expectation it will improve things for us as individuals or for society.
An economic truth I revisit periodically is that every fiat currency (a medium of exchange without intrinsic value or without backing by a commodity with intrinsic value, such as gold) will eventually became worthless.
Last summer, I spent a weekend in Michigan with a group of old friends from high school. A highlight from the trip was a visit to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
By the time you read this, Congress may be putting the finishing touches on a $1 trillion bailout to help America cope with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Do you remember the first time you realized the government was lying to you?
Under the Alice in Wonderland-type process of civil forfeiture, cops can seize your property – anything you own – if they believe that it’s somehow connected to a crime… any crime.
The IRS made headlines last October when a report it submitted to Congress admitted that the agency targets the tax returns of the working poor at about the same rate as wealthy taxpayers.
A decade or so ago, a client I’ll call Will hired me to give him a list of tactics to prepare for an unforeseen natural or man-made disaster. I presented my research to him when we met a few weeks later.
A growing network of companies, along with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, are quietly capitalizing on the explosion of data that most of us unknowingly generate as we go about our day.
The island of Nevis covers just 36 square miles, has 12,000 full-time residents, several hundred hotel rooms, and a tiny airport.
Our planet’s climate has been changing for billions of years. And it will continue for billions more, until our sun becomes a “Red Giant,” devouring the inner planets in the Solar System, including ours.
The world is smaller than ever. After just a seven-hour flight from the US East Coast, you could be in Austria, checking your gold into one of the safest, most private vaults in Europe.
“The empire on which the sun never sets.” That phrase was first attributed to a priest named Fray Francisco de Ugalde, uttered to King Charles I of Spain during the 16th century.
Last week, I described how federal authorities arrested Virgil Griffith for the crime of making a presentation on cryptocurrencies and blockchains using information anyone can download from the internet.
At the end of this past August, an astonishing $17 trillion in global debt had negative yields. About 30% of investment-grade bonds had yields below zero.
If you’re depending on social security or a traditional pension plan to pay for your retirement, chances are you’ll need to work until you die.
Last February, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Eighth Amendment prohibition against “excessive fines and fees” applies to civil forfeiture cases...
Did you know Hollywood star Nicholas Cage played Lois Lane in a Superman movie? Or that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once boasted that the social media giant has “total control of billions of people’s stolen data?”
Given shifting attitudes, it’s harder to publicly argue in favor of offshore investing than it once was.
Many Americans believe that the federal income tax as it’s now imposed is likely unconstitutional.
A fundamental injustice of US tax law is that it discriminates against the approximately nine million Americans who live in other countries.
The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF) is perhaps the most important organization you’ve never heard of. The G-7, which is essentially a club for the world's wealthiest nations, set up the FATF in 1989.