Word: australian
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...tall tales you might hear while holidaying in Australia-a land whose residents famously love to regale visitors with made-up stories-perhaps the tallest of all will be the one you hear in Murchison Station House, a 200,000-hectare sheep farm in the Western Australian outback. There you will be told that everything you see once belonged to Mukarram Jah, the eighth Nizam of Hyderabad, and that it was all seized when he failed to pay his debts. You may be inclined to laugh when you hear this. How could Jah, the grandest of Indian kings, inheritor...
...Over the next 20 years, Jah got his hands-or at least the hands of his Indian servants and hired Australian workers-very dirty. The rewards were not financial. He invested millions in heavy machinery of dubious utility, including an amphibious tank; but his sheep farm never turned a profit. He invested millions more buying a gold mine; but it produced little gold. With all the financial savvy of an eighth-generation royal, Jah once chartered a plane just to bring a can of hydraulic fluid to his farm. Although his business ventures flopped, Jah was enjoying himself immensely...
...time he tried to sell his jewels, someone obstructed him-either the Indian government or one of the numerous relatives who apparently wanted a share of the booty. With many of his assets frozen in India's courts, Jah could no longer bail himself out of trouble as his Australian ventures failed. To pay off his debts, he sold his Perth mansion, but his troubles kept mounting. The crowning ignominy came in 1996 when, fearful that his creditors might get a warrant issued against him, Jah hurriedly caught a plane out of Australia. "The Shah" was exiled again, this time...
...young-adult novel. On a church retreat, a girl caught Franzen cheating at cards and thereafter addressed him as "Cheater." He once publicly confused the words masturbation and menstruation. For a high school speech class, he brought in his stuffed Kanga and Roo toys to illustrate his talk about Australian wildlife. "It's like, if I were making a list of things that I don't want to talk about and don't want to write about publicly, these would be at the top of it," Franzen says. "That's the organizing principle: precisely the things that I think...
...example--investors can more safely tap some of the excitement by owning multinationals. "You don't have to buy local stocks to do this," he says. A quarter of Procter & Gamble's sales come from emerging markets, for example, and China alone accounts for 14% of revenues at Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. Buying more-established companies may seem less exotic, but for a cautious investor, it's a way to wade into the shallow end of the emerging-markets pool...