Why Global Investing Makes Sense
Indeed, America won the lottery when it came to being the ideal place to create an ideal ‘land of milk and honey’. Everything came together. The best and brightest came here. Individualism flourished. There were plenty of resources, plenty of space. We built our roads and railroads, and the Bob Hope generation liberated the world, first by winning WW2, and then by mass producing some of the greatest innovations created by the human race. Our baby boom generation followed by inventing a whole new technology. Technology helped augment the human brain, and solve virtually all of our problems… or so it seemed.
We now know that resources in the ground are fixed – either you have them or you don’t. But with the aid of technology, ideas can now be duplicated anywhere. Inventiveness can spread anywhere. People used to come to the U.S. and learn, and then stay here and build their lives. Now they come here and learn, then go back home to do their inventing and innovating.
As a nation, we’re less inventive, less adventurous, and as a nation where the predominant generation is pushing sixty, we’re less militaristic. We prefer a defense to an offense. And generally speaking, most folks in this country are not as hungry as we as a nation once were. By nature of the fact that you’re reading this book, I can only surmise that you’re working toward excluding yourself from that group. Well done, Investor 2.0.
So, how do we do this? We emerge from the fog of denial that has us trying to replay the nineties. We stop feeling threatened by innovative, smart, hard working people around the world who are determined to work harder than we do. We use our capital to develop natural resources to feed their growth, as a couple of billion of them move from the country to the city, following our model to build their countries.
The success of technology companies in the nineties attracted so much capital and created so much capacity in those areas that profits were cut and monopolies were lost, thereby making those very areas less fruitful for investors. Some of those businesses will be fine, but to get my investment dollar today, a company must have a brilliant Asia strategy, no matter where in the world it resides.
You and I will be able to make big money, easily and without that much creativity, by financing the finding, processing, storing and transporting of the building blocks of society – the things you absolutely have to have to move billions of people from the country to the city. Those billions of determined American lifestyle ‘wannabees’ will need every bit of copper, zinc, cement, platinum, titanium, iron, steel, coal, oil, and pure drinking water that they can lay their hands on…and we’ve got the resources to help supply them. These kinds of investments are now easy to make with exchange traded funds, structured notes, and bonds.
*Excerpts from "A World without Borders" by Dan Frishberg
