Golden advice

I'm going to keep on listening to my cousin for financial advice, wherever he is.

My cousin is always doing something in some country. He is living proof of the old saying that an Estonian is in every harbour in the world. I believe that is the saying.

Many years ago, after he had finished business school in Estonia and made his way into the wide world, I heard he was in Dublin. Because he had once had an unsuccessful stint at a fast food outlet in Brysonville, N.C. when a lad on a work visa programme, I feared he had become one of the exploited Estonian potato pickers in Ireland. Then I Googled him and his LinkedIn profile said he was a derivatives trader in Porto. Literally a couple hours later, he called me from an undisclosed location; he finally admitted he was working at the Bank of Ireland and, yes, he had his own computer there. Apparently, like some electronic funds, he can be in two places at once.

I visited his Orkut profile and he was talking in the messages section to a real princess of Sweden and she was answering. It was like they were characters in Moliere.

He'll sometimes, in a blue moon, call me on Skype with some proposition, always a little sketchy, often involving visas. I learn new country codes from his calls. He was in China -- all he said was that he was in a seaside city with good air. Didn't know it existed. Apparently there is one city like that; I asked Xin, the Chinese guy I met in Firenze, and he answered immediately: Chengdu, and then he made a little wistful grimace.

Anyway, by the time I had pinpointed him, my cousin was long gone, to South Korea.

He called me in mid-November from China -- now he was teaching English -- asking if I had bought gold yet. He said he was converting his earnings into gold. I muttered something about possibly putting 10% into "some ingots".

Gold started climbing no more than 5 days later and now it's almost 50% higher than it was. I gave my relatives some 5-gram plates for Christmas, so I did catch most of the rise.

I hope the Estonian central bank also bought some. They've been gold-shy. In the early part of this decade, they had about 30 times less than Latvia or Lithuania.