I landed in St. Petersburg around midnight. Got into a taxi (an old Volga bought by the driver in former Eastern Germany when he was serving there on a special assignment) and we started driving toward the hotel. The driver’s name was Nitup. From the very start the...

In 1940, the then Soviet Union overthrew the governments of the Baltic nations (Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania), rigged the elections, and forced the newly “elected” governments to request admission into the USSR. Today’s Russia plans to annex the Crimea region after...

The first part of the title above  - meaning “I came, I saw, I conquered” - was pronounced by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. when he emerged victorious over Pharnaces, the king of Pontus. The second part is taken from Virgil and means “Why should fear seize the limbs before...

More than twenty years ago, the late Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “Democracy’s Third Wave”. By that Huntington described the three phases/waves of democratic revolution that the world has experienced, starting with the Jacksonian democracy in the US in the 19th...

One of my favorite authors is Isaiah Berlin. I consider his anthology of essays by the title “The Proper Study of Mankind” as one of the finest books published in the 20th century. Isaiah Berlin had a notorious ideological conflict with Isaac Deutscher. Their public...

By Thursday last week we felt that given the markets drop by 5% this year, it was time to put some money to work by investing into companies with strong fundamentals and which seemed to be at a good entry point. We still believe that this will turn out to be a decent...