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Marco Polo never actually set foot on Japanese soil. But that didn’t stop him from writing the most wildly exaggerated tales about the immense, incredible wealth of Japan– which he called Cipangu. Supposedly Marco Polo had spoken to merchants and traders who’d been there, but it’s entirely possible he made it all up—typical
If you examine the anatomy of a crisis, it seems like almost all of the big ones start with a completely false belief system. “Two weeks to stop the spread”. “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” “We’ll be greeted as liberators.” “The debt doesn’t matter because we owe it to ourselves.” One of
As the 1800s came to a close and the world propelled itself full of innovation and optimism into the 20th century, there was perhaps nowhere else on the planet more admired and envied (except for the United States) than Argentina. In fact, just like America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Argentina
I always marvel when I take my kids to the park. They’re aged 2 and 3, and they pretty much become best friends with anyone else who’s more or less their size and also likes going down the slide. They have precisely one thing in common: they all want to play. And that’s
What does it really mean to have a Plan B— especially these days? We’ve used the term Plan B for almost the entire 15 years since I started this business in 2009. Back then the national debt was really starting to become a major problem. The Federal Reserve was printing trillions of dollars
On July 9, 1997, Apple Computer (as the company was then known) was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Its cash reserves were dwindling rapidly. Its losses were mounting. And the once mighty company was just 90 days away from failing. This was an almost unimaginable outcome for a company whose bold technological
Right at the beginning of the year in early January, I wrote to you about one of the dumbest laws to hit the books in the Land of the Free in a VERY long time. It’s called the Corporate Transparency Act. The article was called, “Get ready to spend two years in prison,”
On November 20, 1945, an international tribunal first convened in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg to prosecute key leaders of Nazi Germany for crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials were a key aspect of holding individuals accountable for the brutal acts and genocide committed under Nazi rule. High-ranking officials, including Hermann Göring and
It was Christmas Eve in the year 1299, and Pope Boniface VIII was performing his usual holiday rituals around Rome when he happened to bump into a very elderly, 107-year-old man from Italy’s Abruzzi region. According to the semi-official legend, the old man claimed to have been in Rome a century before as
In the year 1157, the Republic of Venice was engaged in a bitter trade war with its archrival the Byzantine Empire. While the rest of Europe was barely surviving thanks to the stupidity of their centrally planned feudal economies, Venice was a place where anyone, even the most illiterate peasant, could work hard,
As the year 1980 came to a close, Americans had just experienced the worst annual inflation in decades. It was the culmination of weak, incompetent leadership combined with massive government spending throughout the stagflation of the 1970s— an entire decade of high unemployment, little growth, and a rising cost of goods and services.
Andrew Jackson was never supposed to be President. When he entered the presidential race in 1828, most of the ‘experts’ viewed him as a joke candidate with no chance of victory. Party insiders assumed that, at most, Jackson might steal a few votes from opposition candidates… but that he was no real threat.
In 1227 AD, Genghis Khan stood at the apex of his power, commanding the largest contiguous empire that the world— even to this day— has ever seen. His campaigns had subjugated vast swathes of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and his name alone struck fear into the hearts of kings. Then
Much has been written about Warren Buffett having sold a substantial amount of stocks. And his company, Berkshire Hathaway, is sitting on a record $325 billion cash pile as a result. Buffett has often said that his preferred holding period for an investment is “forever”. So the fact that he has sold so
It was early January 2020, and weird things were happening in the world. Socialism was on the march in the Land of the Free. Conflict, it seemed, was exploding everywhere, both abroad (North Korea, Iran, Yemen) and at home. And most notably, over in China, the Communist government was literally welding people into
