March 25 (Bloomberg) -- Tshering Jamtsho uncoils the burgundy robe from around his chin and smiles as the first light of a Himalayan dawn streams through the casement chiseled into a stone-cold cell at the Pangrizampa Monastery.

Twigs crunch outside, a voice calls out from the dark and an apprentice enters the chamber gripping the ``Mopai.'' The ancient 250-page goatskin volume provides human calculators, called ``tsips,'' with intricate mathematical and astronomical formulas to compute a client's fate and fortune before birth, during life and in the afterlife.

``I am one of the 40 calculators,'' Jamtsho says over cups of the pungent yak-butter tea his predecessors began serving clients here in the Kingdom of Bhutan more than 1,500 years ago.

``What is your investment question?'' the 25-year-old financial analyst and Buddhist lama adds. ``Large numbers of Western businessmen come for our guidance.''

Last year, Jamtsho says, some 300 American and European bankers and businessmen made the grueling journey to Bhutan -- a country smaller than Switzerland, with 180 broadband subscribers, five elevators and less than 700,000 inhabitants -- to have the calculators of Pangrizampa use the hand-scripted Mopai as a financial forecasting tool.

``There's nothing extraordinary about this,'' says Tashi Yezer. He should know. Yezer is the chief executive officer of the Royal Securities Exchange of Bhutan Ltd., the country's stock market, where the trading bell only rings on Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 a.m. ``The exchange closes when our four stock brokers are done,'' Yezer says.

Discretion Guaranteed

Clients' questions for Jamtsho must be specific. Discretion is guaranteed. Fees are modest. Some give food; others offer household goods. Western businessmen mostly pay cash, placing handfuls of foreign currency in a glass next to a statue of Buddha and a copper incense burner in the temple's prayer room. It has been enough to help fund construction of the monastery's new annex and dormitory.

``The Mopai is a time machine,'' says Tshering Nidup, a 28- year-old tsip who began his studies at the age of 6. ``It's a portal into all aspects of a visitor's past, present and future.''

And on this day, far beyond the confines of the calculation chamber, another coterie of analysts at the Federal Reserve Board on Constitution Avenue in Washington contemplates the Green Book, the forecast by the Fed's staff for the $14 trillion U.S. economy.

Dollar Slide

They are watching crude oil surge to a record $110.70 a barrel, the MSCI World Index extend its 11 percent drop for the year and a Carlyle Group mortgage-bond fund moving closer to collapse after defaulting on about $16.6 billion of debt. Gold has surpassed $1,000 for the first time and the dollar slides to a 12-year low against all major currencies as the Fed fails to convince investors that emergency funding has the magic to stem $195 billion in subprime-mortgage writedowns and credit losses, and the wherewithal to prevent a recession.

``And you want to know why businessmen are curious about Bhutan?'' Yezer says.

``I am not surprised,'' Jamtsho adds as the sun illuminates the roaring thunder dragons that decorate the white and turquoise calculation chamber. ``If they did not come here to ask questions, they would go bankrupt.''

Lily Bafandi, director of MB Investment Management AG, a privately held Zurich-based asset-management firm with 60 clients, says there's nothing flaky about asking some cheerfully puzzling lamas to help chart a sound investment strategy.

Zen Economics

``Wall Street market logic is narrow band,'' Bafandi says, a few days before trekking back into the Tibetan plateau with her client book, a laptop and a satellite phone to stay in touch with global markets.

``I do a lot of business from inside tents in the Himalayas,'' Bafandi says, with three Buddhist prayer mantras playing on her office stereo system. ``Buddhist mantras program my mind to vibrate in different dimensions and all of it can drive clients crazy. Some understand what I'm doing; others would love to understand, but they never will.''

Fingering a necklace of ``rudraksha'' beads, designed to pacify negative energy and provide wisdom, the money manager tries to untangle the perplexities of an investment strategy based on what she calls Zen economics.

``By applying what I learn in Bhutan, money is made beyond conventional market norms,'' is Bafandi's cryptic explanation. ``It's a pilgrimage to discover the knowing and pass it on to clients.''

`Invisible Hand'

Many institutional investors at first called it witchcraft when Adam Smith said that money made beyond conventional market norms was the work of an ``invisible hand.'' Yet Bhutan Prime Minister Kinzang Dorji says he won't be surprised if Wall Street isn't ready to embrace a capital market that's mostly regulated by entrepreneurial spirits.

``We call the economic model Gross National Happiness and, after 30 years of applying this ancient principle, we've discovered it's more important than Gross Domestic Product,'' says the prime minister whose name means thunderbolt in Dzongkha, the national language.

``GNH is a method of balancing sustainable growth against the often damaging results of rampant wealth,'' Dorji adds. ``Keeping that balance is the most difficult challenge facing any global leader.''

Dorji says he plans to explain the system this August at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing as part of the kingdom's global promotional campaign alongside those of Olympic sponsors Visa International Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and General Electric Co.

Lamas' Blessing

For Bank of Bhutan Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Kinga Tshering, preserving the harmony between Bhutan's $1 billion GDP and a GNH requires him to get the blessing of calculators before he triggers a major investment project. And that means more to him than ensuring that the local lamas sanctify the bank's new (and only) cash machine.

Similarly blessed are Bhutan's 20,000 megawatts of clean and renewable hydropower, and Tshering says he spends much of his time ensuring that neighboring India's and China's enormous appetites for energy don't end up cursing the national treasure of waterfalls and river basins.

``Foreign governments throughout the region are extremely eager to broker deals that will permit them to tap our hydropower,'' says Tshering, 41, who prior to joining the bank was CEO of the Bhutan Electricity Authority. ``But we made a highly conscious decision to judge investments based on Buddhist philosophy and not free-market materialism. Dumping our resources to the highest bidder for billions and billions of dollars is not our approach.''

`Market Path'

Bhutan now harvests only 2,000 megawatts, with plans to export 5,000 megawatts by 2020 and reach a capacity of 10,000 megawatts by 2028. ``We could have full capacity in a matter of years, if we followed the accepted market path,'' Dorji says, sitting beneath an embroidered tapestry of Buddha in the country's capital city, Thimphu, about 10 miles from the monastery.

``Bhutan's approach to the inevitability and necessity of modernization is to follow a middle path,'' Tshering adds. ``Intuitive economics. Western banks sacrificed intuition for wealth.''

In a land where officials prefer to serve up smiles instead of statistics to prove a point, the prime minister says the best way to comprehend how Bhutan's economic model can be applied as a solution to the current global crisis is to watch a demonstration of archery. It's Bhutan's national sport and the 57-year-old Dorji is locally renowned as the game's Tiger Woods.

Archery Lessons

As 11 people jeer, this reporter shoots homemade wooden arrows from a bamboo bow at a 10-inch-wide circle from a distance of 164 yards (150 meters).

After the arrows flop to the ground far short of their target, Dorji calls archery a metaphor for GNH. ``The distractions were there on purpose to hone intuition, to do what's right under any circumstances,'' he says.

In 1983, Dorji set a record for Bhutan by shooting 33 consecutive bull's-eyes under similar conditions.

``I have no doubts that Western banks consider us to be primitives,'' Tshering laughs. ``By their standards, a profit mandate is more important than a social mandate. Subprime occurred simply because lenders packaged irresponsibility and sold it off to the highest bidder.''

Amid the market turmoil, Tshering has initiated an ambitious five-year plan to turn his bank into a global player by showing institutional investors the wisdom of making GNH a priority.

Export of Bankers

``I intend to ultimately export Bhutanese bankers to New York and London and have them carry the philosophy of GNH as the model for corporate governance,'' Tshering says. ``The last thing I want is Western bankers coming here to modernize us with anything other than technology.''

Over at the stock exchange next door, the ground floor of a traditional Bhutanese timber building decorated with lotus flowers, clouds and phalluses to ward off hobgoblins, trading in the 16 listed companies has stopped and the combined market value holds firm at $25 million.

``We take a holistic approach to capital markets that's missing in the West,'' Yezer says, focusing on the nearby mandala, a geometric pattern that represents the universe. ``Buddhism isn't a religion or an excuse for how we do business, but it is based around a basic economic fact: What goes around, comes around. We call it karma.''

To contact the reporter on this story: A. Craig Copetas in Bhutan at ccopetas@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 24, 2008 18:02 EDT