Why Cyprus? Next week, I'm speaking at the annual VALUEx Caspian conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, hosted by my good friend Isaac Schwartz of Robotti & Company Advisors www.valuexkz.com. To break up the flights, I stared at a map and Cyprus seemed to be roughly on the path there. Unfortunately, after I booked the first leg, I realized that to get from Cyprus to Baku, you have to go 20 hours out of your way and transfer through Moscow. Who says global travel isn't an adventure?

However; I have another reason for going to Cyprus. You see, a few years back, Cypriot banks did some pretty stupid things. They made some dodgy property development loans, over-expanded in consumer lending and when they ran out of bad investments in Cyprus, decided to diversify and buy almost $6 billion in Greek sovereign debt, which was almost immediately written off.