Postcards: When They Write About This Crisis

It's clear to me that people don't understand the source of systemic crisis. It's usually a safe asset... no longer the speculative assets of lands and riches that people can't see or touch.

Dear Fellow Expat:

Sir Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish mercenary, world adventurer, and conman.

He famously raised several hundred men in Charleston, South Carolina, and “invaded” the northern Florida key of Amelia Island in 1817.

There, he declared himself king of the “Republic of the Floridas.”

He printed his own currency – called Amelia dollars - to compensate those troops.

Sadly, his reign wasn’t long – about 100 days before he abandoned the island.

He left those troops to fend for themselves – with a currency worth nothing.

Three years later, MacGregor devised an even more outrageous scheme.

He’d sailed up the Mosquito Coast, a narrow stretch of now Nicaragua and Honduras that faces the Caribbean Sea.

He'd received about 8,000,000 acres of Mosquito land in exchange for jewelry and rum from a Miskito king named George Frederic Augustus I – even though it’s uncertain that the man had the power to gift the land in the first place.

The descendants of shipwrecked slaves and indigenous people h…