Jan. 17, 2010
Casco Viejo, Panama
PLUS: New Year's Cruising In The Sunny Caribbean—from Devil's Island To The Port Of Spain, From Pretty Little St. Lucia To Caribbelgium...
AND: Here's The Best Of The Many Good Reasons To See Asia Now...
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Dear
Overseas Opportunity Letter Reader,
After months of persuasion, I'm delighted to report that resident global real estate investing expert Lief Simon has agreed, finally, to return to the role he filled for many years earlier in his career and to begin producing, again, a global property investment service. Lief has been making money buying, selling, flipping, and renting out real estate around the world for more than 17 years. He's built an extensive portfolio of international property holdings and boasts an impressive track record of success.
All this experience will be brought to bear in Lief's new
Global Property Investor's Marketwatch, launch date imminent.
Meantime, as Lief refocuses his attention on this beat, I've asked if he'd share current thinking, strategies, and opportunities with Live and Invest Overseas readers. Again, I'm delighted to report that he's agreed to make time for this.
Starting this week, therefore, you'll hear from Lief regularly. Long term, he's agreed to write for you every Friday. Right now, however, as we move into this New Year and world markets continue to shake themselves out following last decade's Golden Age of global property investing, Lief has a great deal of timely intelligence to share. So, this week, you'll hear from him more often.
How does Lief interpret current key markets worldwide? And where is he planning to place his own money in 2010? I'll let him speak for himself. Watch this space.
Kathleen Peddicord
P.S. "Aren't you afraid, living over there?"..."What do you do in that part of town? All the action is over here in the center of the city?"...
Since we relocated from downtown Panama City to Casco Viejo six months ago, people, even staff in our Panama City office, have questioned our move. "We like living on the edge," Lief and I smile in response.
For the record, no, we're not scared of our new neighborhood or of our new neighbors. Casco Viejo is home to some of Panama City's poorest residents, sure, but in our experience so far, we respect them, and they respect us. The crime that bubbled beneath the surface over the past few years, as more haves moved in among the have-nots, have been controlled thanks to a very visible Tourist Police presence. You can't wander more than a block or two without encountering these friendly guys patrolling on their bicycles, motorbikes, and golf carts.
These keepers of the peace were out in force yesterday to help corral comings and goings for the final day of the
Seventh Annual Panama Jazz Festival. Casco Viejo's central square, Plaza Catedral, was packed with music-lovers and merry-makers from mid-afternoon until the wee hours. Lief, Jackson, and I joined the crowd for a late-afternoon snack at one of the district's new restaurants, just off the square, where we were able to sit at an outside table and enjoy the music for a couple of hours. Our daughter Kaitlin, spending her mid-winter college break with us, and her boyfriend picked up where we left off, joining the revelers dancing in the streets until, well, Kaitlin can't quite recall this morning what time, exactly, they finally made their way back home.
Living in Paris for four years, I was continually impressed by that city's ability to pull together extraordinary and extravagant festivals, fairs, and public events of all description seemingly overnight and then to deconstruct them just as efficiently. One day, the whole of the Tuileries would be given over to an annual fashion event or all Boulevard St. Germain would be stung with festival lights. Then, just as quickly, the trappings of the celebration would be whisked away for storage until the next
fete. Meantime, the city's cleaning crews would be out
en masse, sweeping and tidying.
I'm finding Panama City as impressive, in its way. Thousands of people, all in the mood for a party, migrated to and through the narrow streets of this little barrio yesterday. All without troubling incident. This morning, the gutters are swept, and the tents and the tables are being hauled off until next time. No, this ain't Paris, but, over here in this tropical French quarter, we sometimes can't help but notice a resemblance.
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P.S. What else this week? Our Correspondent Paul Lewis welcomed the New Year while island-hopping in the sunny
Caribbean...
- "Are the French secretly so ashamed of Devil's Island that they want the jungle to swallow it up?" wrote Paul from his first port of call in French Guiana.
"The name is now shorthand for one of the harshest penal colonies in history, which flourished here between 1852 and 1946 on three tiny islands off the coast of French Guiana, ironically known as the Salvation Islands.
"The faux-traitor Alfred Dreyfus was its most famous inmate, spending five years on Devil's Island itself, the smallest and harshest of the three and reserved for political prisoners and the most violent criminals. But the prison's notoriety was boosted by Henri Carrière's best-selling account of his escape from the islands, 'Papillon,' which became a successful movie. 'Dry Guillotine' by René Belbenoit was an earlier best-seller about the appalling conditions on the islands.
"The colony was opened by Napoleon III after he declared himself Emperor, to house dissenters. But it was also an instrument for colonizing Guiana..."
PLUS: "Of the
many good reasons to visit Asia now," writes Intrepid Correspondent Paul Terhorst, "one of the best is that it's cheap. The Chinese have undervalued the yuan (called the 'kwai' on the streets), the Malays have undervalued the ringgit, all to foment exports. Many other countries have done the same. We travelers enjoy the benefit of export-led growth policies, sort of on the side. Those cheap currencies translate into cheap food and lodging for us.
"The current super-cheap spots in Asia won't stay super-cheap forever. Again, I say,
best to get over to see them now. Start with the least expensive..."
