A park bench in Plaza Intendente Seeber in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires

A park bench in Plaza Intendente Seeber in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires

William Bonner, author of The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble, tells Daily Reckoning readers why they should diversify out of their home countries and shares a personal anecdote from Recoleta to restore your faith in humanity…or at least in city park workers in Buenos Aires. (Full article) Bonner says “the go-go finance-based economies of the Anglo-Saxon world have peaked out,” so investors should be looking at Latin America. He feels Argentina “will be spared the big problems” of the most recent global crisis, and investors should expect higher returns vs. the U.S. over the next 20 years. The second half of Bonner’s piece uses a friend’s travel anecdote to counter some lingering stereotypes about Buenos Aires. A random purse-snatching in Recoleta has a happy ending when the woman receives the following, painstakingly-translated e-mail from a City of Buenos Aires Public Spaces worker: “Hi good afternoon, my name is Emiliano, is that i work doing maintenance of parks and squares in the area of Palermo, and in one of the trash bins encontre a series of documentation to its name and among other things i could detect this mail…i leave my mobile Phone in order to combine a meeting so that you can restore their belongings, but more, i dismissal of you carefully.” Such a tale leaves you wondering just where would we be without good Samaritans, Google Translate and Santo Emiliano?