Too Late For Gold?

I was 13 when India was in crisis. It had borrowed too much money in dollars and was desperate to pay it back.

India needed dollars badly. So the government came up with a scheme to get it from people like my father who were earning money in petrodollars.

The Middle East was booming, and thousands of Indian people had followed my dad’s example and gotten jobs in Dubai and places like it. They were benefiting from the fast-growing economy there.

Dubai’s currency is easily exchanged into dollars, and India was desperate to lure my father and others like him into lending those dollars to the government.

To do this, India offered my father a once-in-a-lifetime deal: Lend your dollars to India, and get 18% interest per year tax-free for 30 years. To sweeten the deal, the government set it up so you could get your money back in dollars after a couple of years if you wanted — or keep earning 18% tax-free for 30 years.

Eighteen percent is an astonishingly high rate of return. You’d be lucky to get that from stocks or risky assets. It’s unthinkable to get that for essentially putting your money into a government-guaranteed bank account.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime shot at making a no-risk, stock-like return.

And even though I was just 13 at the time, I learned something absolutely critical about investing from what my father did when he got this offer…

My dad guessed rightly that even though India was in crisis, there was almost zero chance the government would stiff him. In other words, this crisis was his opportunity.

My father went all in. He put every spare UAE dirham he had into this offer. It was a complete home run for him. And even though my father died in 2000, my mother collected interest payments from this deal until a few years ago.

And here’s what I took from my father’s bet: When the odds are in your favor, you have to make the bet. You have to take the initiative and go for it.