A story on the AP wire reports that Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world to live in. Here is the part that stuck out when I read this article: “What’s so interesting now is that we do see, year to year, more fluctuation in these rankings than we used to,” Powers said. “The investment and flow of capital and businesses into developing countries has made them a bit more expensive.” The article also points out how currency plays a big role; for example, a weaker yen pushed Tokyo down to third.

Today I ran into an ad on a political webpage for a company selling Iraqi dinars ( IQD ). The copy touted betting on Iraq that the country was turning around and those holding the currency would benfit greatly. An article on one of my favorite currency sites, XE.com explains why this falls just short of being a scam:

The Central Bank of Iraq’s stated objective is not to promote the free trade of IQD, as is the case in a true free market economy, but rather to keep the value of the IQD stable. The only way the Bank can ensure the semblance of stability is by tightly controlling the exchange of IQD on the market, and by ensuring that the currency cannot freely trade on the open market. They evidently fear that open trading of the IQD would lead to a rout in which the value of the IQD would sink to practically nothing.

There is a good article on Yahoo Finance by Robert Kiyosaki today. He points out that Warren Buffet is planning on reducing Berkshire Hathoway’s cash holdings by $30 billion dollars, investing much of that money overseas.

This is the real deal guys. All these questions about the US government deficit, monetary inflation, social security, oil, the war on terror — this ugly future is very real and it must be dealt with. Its not the end of the world, but people who have misallocated their assets will be wiped out much like what happened in the dot com boom. Unfortunately I think this realignment will be much worse and involve a very visible decline in the standard of living.

Kiyosaki points out that while financial planners are telling people to save more, Warren Buffet is doing the opposite. What does he know that the average American doesn’t?