Don’t laugh… it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. And if anybody can figure out a way to do it, Templeton’s Mark Mobius immediately comes to mind. Mobius had the following to say at a press conference in London:

We are also looking at Iraq, though we are not invested there now. We would have to convince a custodian bank to set up there though, and make sure the walls of the safe are thick enough… It could be six months to a year until that really comes together, and volumes would be small when it does.

ProShares is adding to its roster of leveraged ETFs. The four new funds are designed to take 200% positions in China, Japan, EAFE and the MSCI Emerging Markets index.

The problems with leveraged ETFs, in general, have been well chronicled. So we won’t get into that here. For readers who are interested, Tristan Yates and Lye Kok have a nice article on the case against leveraged ETFs on Seeking Alpha with a lively discussion in the comment stream. It’s a bit dated, but the general principles still apply. More recently there was a good piece on the subject in Barron’s earlier this year.

NYU Economist Nouriel Roubini has been on television or quoted elsewhere in the press at least 14,000 times in the past year or two. Astonishingly, journalists almost never seem to ask him the most interesting question: “So, Dr. Doom, are there any markets in the world that you actually like?”

A plausible theory is that the question has been asked, but Roubini has dodged it or refused to answer. And that’s exactly what I’d do if I were Dr. Doom. As Joe Weisenthal explains so eloquently in this post on Clusterstock, there almost no downside in being consistently negative about everything.

If you’re convinced that you have come across an amazing, undiscovered Chinese company trading on the OTC Bulletin Board, do yourself a favor and check out Peter Fuhrman’s blog China First Capital. Peter’s an investment banker who specializes in raising capital for Chinese companies and he knows the Chinese IPO landscape pretty well. And it’s hardly the bargain hunter’s paradise that it might appear.

I sometimes think the Chinese term for IPO, “??” ( “shang shi”) has magical, intoxicating effect on some Chinese bosses. They hear it and suspend all their normal caution and suspicion. Soon, they end up agreeing to what are often truly disastrous transactions that don’t even deserve the name IPO.

The BRIC investment theme — as in Brazil, Russia, India and China — has been an enormously popular topic in international investing circles since Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the acronym back in 2003. It’s hard to believe it’s been 6 years. The seminal pieces of Goldman’s BRICs research along with some other interesting papers are gathered here.

Once an investment theme gets its own acronym, it’s usually the kiss of death. But BRICs have been a rare exception. Despite the fact that these markets have been insanely volatile, and despite the fact that everyone and his uncle knew about them all along, BRIC still managed to shoot the lights out. You’d be hard pressed to find any global investing theme that has worked better in recent memory.

No analysis of the global credit crisis and its aftermath can be complete without some reference to Japan. Some folks say the U.S. economy is headed for a Japan-style “Lost Decade”. Others point to Japanese stocks and their failure to come anywhere close to their late 1980s bubble era highs as a stern warning that the U.S. market may never recover its previous highs. Both are wrong.

It’s safe to ignore these theories or any others that hinge on comparisons to Japan. Why? Because Japan is different. Why is it different? Because it is. If you’ve lived there, you know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, ask someone who has.

Vitaliy Katsenelson has a skeptical piece on China’s economic “miracle” at MSN Money. As we pointed out earlier this month, skepticism has never been a strong suit of the Raging China Bulls and it’s refreshing to hear intelligent, contrarian voices like Vitaliy on the investment side or Derek Scissors for a broader economic/political view.

But there’s a fine line between intelligent skepticism and completely missing out on a gigantic investment opportunity for the sake of your beliefs. Like Vitaliy, I used to be a China skeptic. A couple years ago I published a scathing critique of the iShares China fund (ticker: FXI) at Forbes.com.

China is without question one of the biggest and most important markets for global investors to understand. Whether you’re a Bull or Bear on Chinese stocks, you need to understand how the Chinese economy will affect the companies in your portfolio, wherever those companies may be located.

Investors also need to be able to filter through the reams of incessant hype about China that flood the newswires, blogs, and television airwaves. While there is clearly massive opportunity in China, there is also an extraordinary amount of pure hype and sheer nonsense out there waiting to steer you off course.

One of the greatest value investors of our time held forth the other day for a small group of listeners. There were no CNBC cameras, no arenas packed with faithful followers, and no talking lizards.

Just a conference call. Four people asked questions and it was over in less than an hour. It wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the financial press and nary a peep from the blogosphere.

Nothing makes the arbitrary separation of foreign/domestic or developed/emerging markets look more ridiculous than the mining sector. Amazingly, people still think this way. Bloomberg points out that emerging market mining shares sell for a 23% discount to US-based peers, despite much, much better fundamentals.

It’s one thing to move a couple key executives to London or even change your “official” headquarters to Dubai (as Halliburton has done). But it’s quite another to shift an entire business unit across the Atlantic.

That’s what GE (GE) is doing with its consumer finance business “GE Money”.

There’s no shortage of places to find valuation ratios (P/E, price-to-book, price-to-sales, etc.) on the web. But good luck finding a reputable data provider that compares them across countries, in a consistent manner, and for FREE. The S&P/Citigroup family of global indices is an exception, and a very handy resource.

Global diversification can work wonders for a company’s performance. But it can’t work miracles. General Motors (GM) is Exhibit A. Bloomberg reports that GM expects to garner 75% of its revenue from outside the U.S. by 2010 versus 58% today. Compared with its U.S. operations, its business is booming overseas.

“GM has very aggressive growth plans in 2008, particularly if you look at markets like China, India, Brazil and Russia.'’

WSJ has a copy of a memo from M&A uber-lawyer Marty Lipton to clients on the outlook for 2008 M&A activity.

Lipton cites 6 reasons why M&A will continue despite the credit crunch:

Last year, I recommended a company that was facing a lot of skepticism from analysts, but was a leading player in its industry and had especially strong international operations. It also had a compelling valuation and one of its biggest competitors was plagued with major problems.

The company was Nokia (NOK), and it was also featured in December as my top pick for 2007. Since the start of the year, Nokia shares have risen 67%. It has been a huge winner for us and it didn’t involve taking very much risk.

Well, there are plenty of great reasons to bother. Mainly it’s in the form of the greater opportunity set that arises when you look overseas. But it’s also important to remember that correlation is only one of the variables in the portfolio risk formula. You can still benefit from diversification even if correlations are rising.

Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s largest automaker by value, gained 90 yen, or 1.5 percent, to 5,980. The company will introduce a sports car in 2009 to compete against high-end Ferraris and Porsches, the Nihon Keizai reported.

Don’t get me wrong -- I love Toyota -- but this is just crazy talk.

Please don’t fall for this. It is an interesting story, but it is a sideshow, just like the Livedoor scandal that came and went a few months ago. This is not Enron or Eliot Spitzer-caliber material and none of it has anything to do with the fundamental investment case for Japan. Any sell-off as a result of this non-story is simply a great buying opportunity.