Knowing When to Answer When Opportunity Knocks

The Daily Reckoning U.S. Edition

Home . Archives . Unsubscribe

The Daily Reckoning | Saturday, December 8, 2012 Of the opportunities you’ve had...which did you take? A reader charms our ego and appeals to our vanity, Plus, all this week’s reckonings archived for your poolside enjoyment... --------------------------------------------------------------- Wow, they’ve actually done it! For more than 3 years this personal electronics giant has been attempting to do the impossible — and now it appears as though they’ve finally succeeded. Once this new product hits store shelves, technology as we know it may never be the same. Click here now to find out what hot new product they’ll soon be releasing — and how you could go for massive gains when they do. Joel Bowman, checking in today from Rancho Santana, Nicaragua... Joel Bowman Owing entirely to the sublime location from which your managing editor is today reckoning...there will be almost no further reckoning. Down here on Nicaragua’s sunset coastline, Mother Nature allows for minimum non-surf time...and we have almost exhausted our entire “land hours” quota for today. Over the past 48 hours or so, attendees at the Second Rancho Santana Sessions gathering heard from a group of insightful individuals. Your managing editor also spoke. But back to the insightful individuals. Eric Fry led off proceedings with a fascinating discussion-starter about life opportunities...both those taken...and those missed. Serving as this week’s feature essay is the first part of Mr. Fry’s presentation, lightly edited, of course. Please enjoy... [Nota Bene: This column first appeared in the Thursday, December 6, 2012 edition of the Daily Reckoning] The Daily Reckoning Presents The Egyptian Train Eric Fry Opportunities are usually like a train. Any questions? Opportunities are usually like a train. They arrive and then they depart...and disappear down the tracks. Choo-choo!! But opportunities are not always the same kind of train. Some are Swiss trains. They arrive on time, leave on time. End of story. Some are like Amtrak trains. They arrive on time...or not. Leave on time...or not...and frequently stall on the tracks for 30 minutes or so, mid-journey, due to some power outage, signal failure or whatever. But even Amtrak trains offer a relatively reliable arrival and departure schedule. The most puzzling opportunities — and often most important opportunities — are like an Egyptian train. So unreliable is its arrival and departure that you begin to doubt that any such train actually exists. Last night, Joel Bowman shared his experience taking a train from Luxor to Cairo a few years back. He and his family arrived at the station around 8:00 PM — about one hour before the scheduled arrival — then waited patiently for a few hours, then impatiently for a couple more hours...but the train did not arrive. Finally, Joel’s exasperated father demanded answers. He worked his way up the chain of command until getting to the top guy. “When will the train arrive?” Joel’s father barked. “I guarantee that it not arrive in less than five minutes,” the Egyptian train supervisor smiled. The train finally arrived about two hours later, and lurched out of the station on its 8-hour trip to Cairo...that lasted about 14 hours. On some level, everyone understands that opportunities are like trains. And yet, most folks live their lives as if opportunity is like a car, sitting in their garages, waiting for them to decide when to leave and where to go. But that’s not true. There is no expression in the English language for the “Car that got away” or “Whoops, too late, the car’s left the garage.” All of us have missed trains. Each of us has a story about a “train that left the station.” It might have been a certain job offer we wished we had taken, a certain date we wished we had not declined, a certain lie we wish we had not told, or a certain truth we wish we had not told. There are moments in every life where binary options present themselves. A real life, “Let’s Make a Deal.” You must choose Door number one or the curtain where Carol Merrill is standing. One option opens to a chain of life-altering opportunities, the other opens to a goat on a leash — i.e., life-changing forgone opportunities. If you think back on the most important trains you’ve missed in your life, I’d bet that very few of them were “Swiss trains” — predictable, definite choices between “Option A” and “Option B.” I’d even be willing to wager that few of them were Amtrak trains. Probably, for most of us, the most memorable missed train was an “Egyptian train.” Either the opportunity seemed so grim and uninviting that we never honestly considered it in the first place or, alternatively, we actually bought a ticket and sat on the platform. But after so many hours had passed, we doubted ourselves and left. Preparing for adversity is an Egyptian train ride, preparing for national adversity is, perhaps, the ultimate Egyptian train ride. Friends and family rarely understand why you’d want to ride on that stupid thing in the first place. And then, even after you’ve “bought your ticket,” you sit and sit on the platform while time slowly passes. Everyone else goes about their lives. You look like an idiot. To use the most infamous example, the opportunity to escape the Holocaust was certainly not a Swiss train; it was an Egyptian one. With few exceptions, the folks who saved themselves, inflicted severe hardships upon themselves by selling businesses, abandoning lifetime friends and familiar neighborhoods to relocate elsewhere. And even after arriving on the platform of their “new lives,” they would have possessed very little confidence that they had made an intelligent decision. Many of them must have felt like paranoid idiots, in other words. We say Bravo! for paranoid idiots. Both before and since Nazi Germany, many are the paranoid idiots who saved themselves, or at least their wealth, by boarding the clangy, rickety Egyptian train of emigration and/or international diversification. The financial survivors of the serial financial crises of the last three decades were the folks who took steps well in advance to diversify their assets out of their national currencies and financial institutions into dollars and foreign financial institutions. Argentineans understand this imperative viscerally, thanks to generations of fiscal mis-management and corruption. Americans don’t. We are accustomed to being the land of opportunity, the preeminent global super-power, the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. We are the cat’s meow. Why on earth would we ever board any train? Maybe we shouldn’t, but sovereign dominance is never a lasting endeavor. The First become last...or at least no longer first. The nearby chart illustrates this point very clearly. Seventeen years ago, three of the five so-called PIIGS nations, possessed AA credit ratings or better. At the same time, the Latin nations of Brazil, Chile and Columbia labored under “junk” credit ratings, or near-junk. Fast-forward to the present, the once-highly-rated European nations in this chart have plummeted into the ranks of junk, or near-junk, credits. Conversely, the formerly junk Latin credits are now investment-grade. Such is the way of nations...and always has been. Responding to the millennia-long reality that no nation possesses a monopoly on opportunity, individuals throughout history have attempted to relocate from less desirable locations to more desirable locations. In other words, throughout history a certain percentage of the world’s inhabitants have felt they lost the “lottery of life,” or at least that they did not win it. Warren Buffett, the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and latter-day champion of “fair taxation,” has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). “I was born in 1930,” Buffett explained to a Fortune reporter a while back. “I won the ovarian lottery. I was born in the United States. ... I was born white. ... I was born male. ... I had all kinds of luck.” The same thing could be said of millions of Americans born in 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970 and 1980. But what about 2012? Still true? To be continued... Regards, Eric Fry for The Daily Reckoning [Editor’s Note: In case you weren’t able to join us down here in Nicaragua, there’s still a way for you to catch every presentation in full. We’ve recorded the entire conference in both MP3 and crisp, HD Video formats, so you don’t have to miss a minute of this year’s event. Click here now to secure your copy, while they’re still available. Grab Your Share Of Big Oil’s Paycheck... Pictured below is a map many Americans have never seen. That’s a shame, because today it holds one of the best profit opportunities the market has to offer. Big oil knows this map well — heck, it’s one of the reasons they always seem to turn a profit! Today, thanks to a little-known loophole, you could start grabbing your share. Click the map to find out how... ALSO THIS WEEK in The Daily Reckoning... What If? By Eric Fry Is America still the undisputed “Numero Uno”? Not according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) “Where to be Born Index.” A quarter of a century ago, America topped the list. Today, it is #16. This quirky EIU Index attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead. The index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys...to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Lincoln Uncensored By Jeffrey Tucker To be sure, this was a mind-bending experience. I watched Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln on the same weekend that I read Joseph Fallon’s Lincoln Uncensored, the e-book of the week released by the Laissez Faire Club. Worlds collided. Fallon’s book, which is brilliant and the most useful Lincoln book I’ve read, sticks to the facts by organizing material from the 10 volumes of collected writings and speeches of Lincoln. The United (Police) State of America An Interview with Doug Casey Louis James: Doug, after conversations like the one we had last week, we often get letters from angry readers who accuse you of hating America, disloyalty, and perhaps even treason. These people don’t know or understand what I do about you — that you love the idea that was America. It’s the United State it has become for which you have nothing but contempt. Perhaps we should try to explain this to them? The United (Police) State of America, Part II An Interview with Doug Casey “President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism.” Of course the very concept of terrorism is highly malleable, with over 100 definitions floating about — as we’ve discussed. But apart from that, it’s now accepted that the president and his minions have the right to kill almost anyone. Do you have any of these coins in your pocket? If you find any of these coins floating around, you may want to begin saving them... In short, we’ve just uncovered what could be the safest (and easiest) investment idea we’ve ever found. And it’s been hiding in our pockets the whole time. What coin is it? And why should you begin hoarding them now? Click here to find out. The Weekly Endnote... Last week in the “letters to the editor” space, we ran a selection of not-so-flattering reader mail. This week — perhaps because we’re experiencing a Rancho Santana-induced spell of optimism and peace — we’re going to do the opposite. Following is a letter we received from a reader a couple of days back. Sometimes, it’s nice to know we’re not alone... Thanks go to Reckoner Mike R., who writes, kindly... I am a former officer in the US military who was completely in line with neo-conservative, nationalist nonsense. I am ashamed to say that I spent a quarter of a century working obediently for the US military and trusting my future and the future of my family to such an evil entity. Somewhere along my career I found on lewrockwell.com one Dr. Laurence Vance. This led me to reevaluate my entire way of thinking. I began to read and study. In time I realized that I was horribly out of line with the truth. Along came Agora and your writings, as well as those of others. Too old to make a huge difference economically, I pursued an understanding of war and morality, the free market, and the oppression of the State as it was truth as I had not experienced it. All of this added together over years to cause me to change the direction of my life, too late to make a sizable difference in my family's financial future, but not too late to mitigate the damage done by false beliefs. Enough informal tutoring instilled in me the basic understanding of money and the power of the free market. I am too old to make a marked difference in my own future, but I am not too old to make s difference in the future of my son and grandsons. Even so, my future is more secure because of financial actions I have taken due to the writings of so many authors, with Agora ranking high among them. I have realigned my limited wealth along rational lines, thanks to good teaching. I have moved from paper money to things of value, to include small holdings in precious metals and real estate. I have gotten out of debt and own what I own, even if it is not substantial. People around me sometimes comment as to my very different position in these times. I have had the chance to teach and spread truth to others. It has been an honor and a very satisfying activity to introduce others to the truths about the world. Thank you. Part of my thanks is my subscription to products at Agora. Money well-spent. I wanted to fill in the other part, which is personal thanks to all of the writers that I have read for so long. You are among the tops, not only because you are gifted communicators, but because you are teaching truth to people who live in a world of lies. In a future world, in which I am hot pushing 60, and in which I was born with something in my mouth. If not a silver spoon, something. I work to establish small trusts that will give stability to my grandchildren. I hope that you realize how far your teachings can go. They are not only a profitable enterprise, but they profit society DR: Shucks... --- Don’t worry...we’ll return to our regular diet of “doom and gloom” next week. In the meantime, feel free to email any thoughts you have to the address below and... ..enjoy your weekend. Cheers, Joel Bowman Managing Editor The Daily Reckoning ---------------------------------------------------------------- Here at The Daily Reckoning, we value your questions and comments. If you would like to send us a few thoughts of your own, please address them to your managing editor at joel@dailyreckoning.com Additional articles and commentary from The Daily Reckoning on: Twitter Facebook DR iPhone APP The Daily Reckoning is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. To end your Daily Reckoning e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from Daily Reckoning, feel free to cancel your free subscription here. By submitting your email address, you consent to Agora Financial delivering daily email issues and advertisements. Please read our Privacy Statement. For any further comments or concerns please email us at dr@dailyreckoning.com. If you are you having trouble receiving your Daily Reckoning subscription, you can ensure its arrival in your mailbox by whitelisting the Daily Reckoning. 2012 Agora Financial, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Reproduction, copying, or redistribution (electronic or other wise, including on the World Wide Web), in w hole or in part, is encouraged p rovided the attribution Daily Reckoning is preserved. Attribution must include a link to the original article url located on http://dailyreckoning.com. Nothing in this e-mail should be considered personalized investment advice. A lthough our employees may answer your general customer service questions, they are not licensed under securities laws to address your particular investment situation. No communication by our employees to you should be deemed as personalized investment advice.We expressly forbid our writers from having a financial interest in any security they personally recommend to our readers. All of our employees and agents must wait 24 hours after on-line publication or 72 hours after the mailing of a printed-only publication prior to following an initial recommendation.Any investments recommended in this letter should be made only after consulting with your investment advisor and only after reviewing the prospectus or financial statements of the company.