Why has Bill Gates been paying off so many bad actors ?

If you fancy amusing yourself, take a look at the people and entities that the World Economic Forum follows on Twitter. We have an Excel spreadsheet available on request, thanks to our friends at Flycast Media. There are just over 500 on that list, and that list makes for intriguing reading. You can see for yourself simply by dropping in on the @wef Twitter feed.

If you fancy amusing yourself some more, take a look at just how many media companies  and sundry coronavirus ‘bad actors’ (including Professor Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College London and the BBC) have been in receipt of funding by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over recent years. It’s a fairly extensive list. Compliance has been expensive but, for Bill Gates, probably worth it, dilettante billionaire healthcare nerd that he is.

Of all the science fiction writers this correspondent has read, Nigel Kneale is perhaps the best – sly, erudite and witty, with a deep grasp of scientific principles. And of Nigel Kneale’s three Professor Quatermass films, Quatermass 2 (1957) is our favourite. (If you haven’t seen it but might like to, probably best to skip the next three paragraphs.)

The film begins with hundreds of meteorites landing in an area of south-east England known as Winnerden Flats. When our hero goes to investigate, he discovers a huge complex under construction (the role of the site in the film is played by a Shell oil refinery in Stanford-le- Hope in Essex). This complex, it turns out, is based on Quatermass’ own designs for a future manned lunar colony. As a colleague, Marsh, examines one of the meteorites, it explodes, releasing a toxic gas and leaving an odd, V-shaped mark on Marsh’s face. An armed private security force soon arrives, armed with machine guns, the men all sporting similar V-shaped marks, and Marsh is spirited away.

The ‘cover story’ is that the Winnerden Flats complex has been built in secret, to manufacture a form of artificial food. This is true, up to a point – but the food in question is not intended for anything human. It transpires that a conspiracy of alien control reaches all the way into the highest arms of the British government. (In the US and Canada, the film’s title was Enemy From Space.) The film is very much of its time – a post-WW2, Cold War gloomer – but with certain characteristics that we can relate to amid the chaos of the current coronavirus “pandemic”: a supine police force; government budgets on strange projects that spiral out of control; the only hope being the rationality and bravery of a handful of principled scientists..

The conspiracy in Quatermass 2 is – like all good conspiracies – one that takes root in conditions of absolute secrecy. Only the Professor’s sleuthing, and his dedication to science, reveals it.

So we were intrigued to hear the investment strategist Sean Corrigan of Cantillon Consulting mention HG Wells’ The Open Conspiracy in this recent podcast (which is highly recommended – Sean is nothing if not outspoken).

The Open Conspiracy was published in 1928. Its full title is The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. Wells, a lifelong socialist, wished to advance a “scheme to thrust forward and establish a human control over the destinies of life and liberate it from its present dangers, uncertainties and miseries.” Wells proposed “drawing together a proportion of all or nearly all the functional classes in contemporary communities in order to weave the beginnings of a world community out of their selection.” Such a technocracy sounds perfect if you happen to be one of the self-appointed elite. If you’re not..

Some media are starting to report on presumed coronavirus conspiracy theories. But whatever it is, it’s not a conspiracy (“a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful”) if it’s conducted in public in plain sight. And you’ve even published a book about it called The Great Reset. Kudos to Klaus Schwab for chutzpah, if for nothing else.

For those of us who have long been suspicious of the benefit of bigger and bigger government, the global response to Covid 19 is just another policy error in a long litany of policy errors. In 2008, the financial lobby bullied governments and brought federal assistance into their industry, handily juicing profits. This time, it appears to be crony capitalists within the Big Pharma sector that are exerting untold influence over governments – through fear and outrageous fiscal and moral response. During the nadir of the financial crisis in 2008, politicians were told that the world would witness another ‘dark age’ if federal assistance wasn’t forthcoming. This time, governments around the world are listening to the doomsday warnings from Big Pharma lobbyists, aided and abetted by Big Media. The 2008 crisis was made much worse by financial ‘experts’ relying on VAR-based risk measurement. Today, it is another three letter acronym – PCR – that is worsening the current situation.

You can’t watch this video . But in it, the German lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich (a consumer protection trial lawyer in Germany and California who has successfully sued both VolksWagen and Deutsche Bank) asks three fundamental questions:

1. Is there a coronavirus pandemic “or is there only a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test pandemic ? Specifically, does a positive PCR test result mean that the person tested is infected with COVID-19, or does it mean absolutely nothing in connection with the COVID-19 infection ?

2. Do the so-called anti-coronavirus measures such as the lockdown, mandatory face masks, social distancing and quarantine regulations serve to protect the world’s population from coronavirus, or do these measures serve only to make people panic

– so that they believe without asking any questions that their lives are in danger, so that in the end in the pharmaceutical and tech industries can generate huge profits from the sale of PCR tests, antigen and antibody tests and vaccines, as well as the harvesting of our genetic fingerprints ?

3. Is it true that the German government [in particular] was massively lobbied.. by the chief protagonists of this so-called coronavirus pandemic ?”

The PCR test, Dr. Fuellmich goes on to add

..is unreliable, can be manipulated and is not suited for diagnostics. Its extremely high percentage of over 90% of false positives is the one and only reason a pandemic has been justified and declared by the WHO plunging the whole world into lockdown, face-masks and restrictions of liberty.

Dr Fuellmich’s conclusion is that we have not experienced a coronavirus pandemic. We have experienced a PCR test pandemic in which those PCR tests are unfit for purpose.

At the end of Quatermass 2, as the Winnerden Flats complex lies in fiery ruins and the alien menace appears vanquished, Police Inspector Lomax tells the Professor:

You know what worries me ? How am I going to make a final report about all this ?

The Professor responds:

What worries me is how final can it be ?

Global governments, like drunken sailors, will continue to lurch from one policy error to another, cheered on by crony capitalists and a captured mainstream media. We must continue to manage our firm’s balance sheet, our families’ money and our clients’ money in this environment, not the environment we would prefer or hope to see. We hold assets with real economic value, be they UK listed broker dealers, US pork producers or Western Australian gold miners. These assets come with higher short term price volatility than bonds, for example. But that is the price we have to pay to build a portfolio that allows us to sleep well at night. Just as we did in March and April this year, we will react to sharp fluctuations in asset prices by simply ‘following the cash-flow’ and allocating more by way of capital to firms generating strong cash-flows and away from firms experiencing tougher operating conditions on the ground. We believe this strategy will continue to generate strong returns as our mettle and resolve get tested in further crises. Unlike Professor Q, we aren’t in the least bit worried that there may be more drama to come.

Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.

Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and specialist managed funds.