How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely: The life-changing personal finance and investment bestseller

by Andrew Craig

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‘quantitative easing’).

150 ex-professional footballers currently in prison in the UK.

these individuals failed to make any provision for life after football and then turned to crime when their career ended, usually drug dealing, in a bid to sustain their lifestyle.

annuity

Arab Spring in 2010 was inflation, primarily in food prices.

There is a very high correlation between understanding finance and being wealthy.

One of the fundamental truths of capitalism is that capital makes a great deal more money than labour;

The fact that making money from money is ultimately easier than making money from work is entirely logical when you consider that you only have a limited number of hours in which to work. On the other hand, your money ‘never sleeps’, as the old saying is quite right in telling us. Money will also breed like rabbits if you know what you’re doing. Even multimillionaire actors, businesspeople and rock stars have often made vastly more money from their money than from their performance fees, salaries or record sales.

‘efficient market hypothesis’

in the long run, no company should ever be worth 25 times the value of its sales or a few hundred times the value of its profits.

wealth is never destroyed,

peripheral

One of the best things about investment today is that there is a vast range of things you can invest in: bonds, equities (shares), commodities, currency (foreign exchange), real estate (property) and funds, to name a few.

the successful investor should ensure they are using the right mix of all – or at least most – of them.

invest in funds or insurance products

there is a risk that financial advisers might recommend products that pay them the highest commissions rather than those best suited to your needs. While this might

many of the smartest investors in the world advocate holding a meaningful percentage of your wealth in gold.

suboptimal

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‘doing an ostrich’

With money, as with so many things in life, it is the tortoise who generally wins the race, not the hare.

in investment, slow, steady and consistent wins the race and small numbers add up to very big numbers over time.

substandard

the last decade has seen humanity produce something like 25 per cent of all economic output ever in the whole of human history.

It seems rather incredible that at the same time that this cornucopia of wealth has been created, so many people in the developed world feel that the world is the worst it has ever been.

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Because globalization has meant that billions of people elsewhere in the world have finally been able to compete for the Earth’s inherently limited resources.

since the end of the Second World War, people in the developing world have increasingly been able to compete for jobs and capital with those in the West.

China’s decision to pursue economic development in the late 1970s, and the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later, this process has accelerated.

those of us in ‘rich’ countries are losing our relative and absolute economic power to billions of hungry, aspirational and hard-working people elsewhere.

is possible for there to be economic growth that actually improves our environment, otherwise known as ‘sustainable development’.

increased global competition by ‘doing an ostrich’ and borrowing vast sums of money, primarily from the developing world.

invest in the dynamism, ingenuity and hard work of these developing countries.

This 1 per cent have been shareholders in the explosive growth of the emerging world.

The value (purchasing power) of one pound or one dollar has fallen by around 90 per cent since 1971.

The only benefit is that you can use it to your investing advantage.

President Clinton

Boskin Commission.

inflation numbers ‘are cooked like a thanksgiving turkey’, to

many Western economies are actually going backwards in real terms (i.e. they are in recession) while their politicians claim they are growing.

indices

blinkered

throes

Carrie, can’t afford the deposit on her apartment but realizes that she owns tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of shoes. Please don’t be that person.

primary causes of the financial crises in the USA and UK has been our unhealthy obsession with home ownership and the widespread failure of many people to understand how to value property over time, as against the other main assets you might put money into such as shares, bonds and commodities.

‘you can’t go wrong with bricks and mortar’

Billionaire Jim Rogers,

property as a fundamentally bad investment due to its illiquidity (how hard it is to buy and sell) and

prognosticate