“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”
Get your Free
financial review
For some time now, we have referred to the fact that many western governments appear to be some way into the final ‘looting of the Treasury’ stage of economic and cultural proceedings. By way of example, we previously cited the behaviour of Jamaal Bowman, a congressman representing constituents in New York City, who on September 30th 2023, during the already largely discredited Biden administration, committed an act of insurrection by attempting to subvert democracy in the United States. That afternoon, Congress was about to vote on a key piece of legislation that would keep the government temporarily funded in order to prevent a shutdown that would have gone into effect only hours later. But Bowman – and many members of his party – did not want the vote to take place, simply because they wanted to embarrass the opposition. So, he deliberately pulled the fire alarm, causing the building to be evacuated. This isn’t some conspiracy theory – the cameras plainly showed Bowman pulling the fire-alarm, and he admitted to it. He subsequently went on to demand that descendants of former slaves receive, “at minimum”, $14 trillion by way of reparations.
And this was way before the grotesque looting of USAID funds and their redirection around the world in support of almost exclusively leftist causes became public knowledge, thanks to Elon Musk and his team at DOGE.
Now, sadly, the bromance between Elon Musk and President Trump is over, and with it, any realistic hope of bringing US government finances into order. The schism looks to be permanent, with Musk having publicly described Trump’s spending bill as a “disgusting abomination” and adding, “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong.”
Whereas DOGE in its short life under Elon started out with the best of budget-cutting intentions (badly denting leftist support for Teslas in the process), the fiscal conservative Rand Paul shared Musk’s misgivings about Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” given its provisions to raise the limit on federal government borrowing by $5 trillion. In the immediate aftermath of the bust-up, the price of silver, for example, took many by surprise (though not ourselves) by rallying first above $35 and then above $36 an ounce.
None of the behaviour of precious metals prices or broader commodities prices this year should be surprising anyone. There are times to own financial assets, and there are times to own real assets. We have long shared our fundamental belief that during a seeming ‘end of empire’ period, with government debts globally spiralling out of control, now is the time to own the latter. We particularly favour the monetary metals, gold and silver, for three key reasons:
- We know a little about financial history;
- Valuations of related mining concerns remain extremely attractive;
- They remain extraordinarily under-owned given their recent strength.
Speaking of ‘end of empire’.. Historians continue to argue about the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire – a debate that attains added piquancy today given that western civilisation and culture appears to be following Rome over the cliff’s edge. Of the factors often cited for the fall of Rome, some seem to have uncanny echoes here in 2025, including:
- The loss of traditional values and a widespread moral malaise;
- Unchecked invasions by foreign peoples (this time facilitated, rather than resisted, by politicians);
- Widespread corruption and political in-fighting;
- Unsustainable foreign expansion and military over-reach;
- Economic weakness, vast indebtedness and uncontrolled currency inflation.
As professional investors we might be expected to have a particular wariness for these last end-of-cycle characteristics. What would be wholly unique to our modern experience of crisis would be that it was deliberately triggered by the delusional beliefs of a warped doomsday cult – one that believed in anthropogenic climate change, the pursuit of ‘Net Zero’, and an unchallenged commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the expense of any adherence to simple meritocracy.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of our current crisis is the raft of problems triggered by distant, unaccountable elitism. Catherine Liu (‘The Virtue Hoarders’):
“For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes. Members of the PMC have memories of a time when they were more progressive—during the Progressive Era, specifically. They once supported working-class militancy in its epic struggles against robber barons and capitalists like Mrs. Leland Stanford Jr., Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, but today, they go to Stanford and view private foundations bearing those same names as models of philanthropy and sources of critical funding and recognition.
“They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.
“The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people.
“If its politics amount to little more than virtue signalling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance. The much-maligned Hillary Clinton was honest in her contempt for ordinary people when, in 2016, she dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables.” Their 2016 defiance of PMC and liberal nostra has only hardened into reactionary antiauthoritarianism, which another reactionary demagogue will seek to exploit.
“PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, and deplorable child-rearing habits. When the PMC sympathized with the plight of masses of working people, it also pioneered professional standards of research grounded in professional organizations like the American Medical Association, the Association of University Professors, and all the professional organizations that currently dominate academic life. In organizing professional life, the PMC tried to protect the integrity of specialists and experts against the power of capitalists and the markets.. Those heady days of PMC heroism are long gone. The PMC, with its professional discipline and aura of disinterestedness, did very well for itself during the Depression, during World War II, and in the postwar period with the expansion of universities and the growing complexity of the American and social economic order.
“When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favour of capitalists it once despised.. The post-1968 PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live, and in large part, they have succeeded in destroying and building in its own image the physical and now cybernetic infrastructure of our everyday lives.
“As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history..
“Although the PMC is profoundly secular in nature, its rhetorical tone is pseudo-religious. While the PMC infuriates conservative Christians with its media monopoly on liberal righteousness, it finds salvation, like most Protestant sects, in material and earthly success. In liberal circles, talking about class or class consciousness before other forms of difference is not just controversial; it is heretical. They call you a “class reductionist” if you argue that race, gender, and class are not interchangeable categories. They pile on with the legalistic and deadly term intersectional to accommodate the materialist critique of their politics.
“The PMC simply does not want its class identity or interests unmasked. Young people wanting to enter what the Ehrenreichs called the “liberal professions” and gain positions in academia and the culture and media industries have had to adapt themselves to the Procrustean bed of PMC-dominated networks of influence..
“It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background décor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people. PMC centrism is a powerful ideology. Its priorities in research and innovation have been shaped more and more by corporate interests and the profit motive, while in the humanities and social sciences, scholars are rewarded by private foundations for their general disregard for historical knowledge, not to mention historical materialism.
“The rewards for following ruling-class directives are just too great, but the intellectual and psychic price that has to be paid for compliance should be too high for any member of society. In academia, the American PMC has achieved a great deal in establishing the rigors of peer review consensus and research autonomy, but we can no longer afford to defend its cherished principle of epistemological neutrality as a secret weapon against “extremism.” We live in a political, environmental, and social emergency: class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times.”
Academia has undoubtedly been problematic, but the last five years point an even more damning finger against science and scientism (“an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation”). As the author Ian Hall points out in his jeremiad against climate-change advocates, ‘Unsettled Science’, the scientific lobby was largely enabled by President Truman after America’s victory in the Second World War; the winding down of the Manhattan Project that helped develop the atom bomb led to 130,000 scientists being put out of work. And so began the era of government research contracts. This is not to say that all climate scientists are hopelessly conflicted by dint of their addiction to money from the ‘Big State’, only to suggest that, as Ian Hall advises, a philosophy of ‘follow the money’ may well explain some of the professional behaviours and strong feelings linked to the topic of climate change. When you’re paid to follow the party line, you follow the party line. Hall cites President Eisenhower in his parting address of 1961 (the emphasis is ours):
“Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Anthony Mann’s 1964 film ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ – which this correspondent recently watched – is not, in truth, a terribly good treatment. Although it looks spectacular (it set a record, for example, for the largest outdoor film set ever made), the plot is haphazard and many of the performances are frankly second rate. It covers the rise and fall of Commodus (played by Christopher Plummer), son of the great Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (played by Alec Guinness) and nicely displays the internal corruption that led to Rome’s eventual fall. (Ridley Scott’s 2000 version ‘Gladiator’ covers similar ground, more entertainingly.) In its final moments, the honest general Gaius Livius (Stephen Boyd) leaves Rome having rejected its emperorship; a motley array of senators noisily offers exorbitant bribes to whichever remaining general will take up the throne on their behalf. “Three million dinars for the throne and the empire of Rome !” A concluding voiceover solemnly intones: “A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.”
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
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 also in systematic trend-following funds.
“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”
Get your Free
financial review
For some time now, we have referred to the fact that many western governments appear to be some way into the final ‘looting of the Treasury’ stage of economic and cultural proceedings. By way of example, we previously cited the behaviour of Jamaal Bowman, a congressman representing constituents in New York City, who on September 30th 2023, during the already largely discredited Biden administration, committed an act of insurrection by attempting to subvert democracy in the United States. That afternoon, Congress was about to vote on a key piece of legislation that would keep the government temporarily funded in order to prevent a shutdown that would have gone into effect only hours later. But Bowman – and many members of his party – did not want the vote to take place, simply because they wanted to embarrass the opposition. So, he deliberately pulled the fire alarm, causing the building to be evacuated. This isn’t some conspiracy theory – the cameras plainly showed Bowman pulling the fire-alarm, and he admitted to it. He subsequently went on to demand that descendants of former slaves receive, “at minimum”, $14 trillion by way of reparations.
And this was way before the grotesque looting of USAID funds and their redirection around the world in support of almost exclusively leftist causes became public knowledge, thanks to Elon Musk and his team at DOGE.
Now, sadly, the bromance between Elon Musk and President Trump is over, and with it, any realistic hope of bringing US government finances into order. The schism looks to be permanent, with Musk having publicly described Trump’s spending bill as a “disgusting abomination” and adding, “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong.”
Whereas DOGE in its short life under Elon started out with the best of budget-cutting intentions (badly denting leftist support for Teslas in the process), the fiscal conservative Rand Paul shared Musk’s misgivings about Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” given its provisions to raise the limit on federal government borrowing by $5 trillion. In the immediate aftermath of the bust-up, the price of silver, for example, took many by surprise (though not ourselves) by rallying first above $35 and then above $36 an ounce.
None of the behaviour of precious metals prices or broader commodities prices this year should be surprising anyone. There are times to own financial assets, and there are times to own real assets. We have long shared our fundamental belief that during a seeming ‘end of empire’ period, with government debts globally spiralling out of control, now is the time to own the latter. We particularly favour the monetary metals, gold and silver, for three key reasons:
Speaking of ‘end of empire’.. Historians continue to argue about the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire – a debate that attains added piquancy today given that western civilisation and culture appears to be following Rome over the cliff’s edge. Of the factors often cited for the fall of Rome, some seem to have uncanny echoes here in 2025, including:
As professional investors we might be expected to have a particular wariness for these last end-of-cycle characteristics. What would be wholly unique to our modern experience of crisis would be that it was deliberately triggered by the delusional beliefs of a warped doomsday cult – one that believed in anthropogenic climate change, the pursuit of ‘Net Zero’, and an unchallenged commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the expense of any adherence to simple meritocracy.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of our current crisis is the raft of problems triggered by distant, unaccountable elitism. Catherine Liu (‘The Virtue Hoarders’):
“For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes. Members of the PMC have memories of a time when they were more progressive—during the Progressive Era, specifically. They once supported working-class militancy in its epic struggles against robber barons and capitalists like Mrs. Leland Stanford Jr., Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, but today, they go to Stanford and view private foundations bearing those same names as models of philanthropy and sources of critical funding and recognition.
“They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.
“The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people.
“If its politics amount to little more than virtue signalling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance. The much-maligned Hillary Clinton was honest in her contempt for ordinary people when, in 2016, she dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables.” Their 2016 defiance of PMC and liberal nostra has only hardened into reactionary antiauthoritarianism, which another reactionary demagogue will seek to exploit.
“PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, and deplorable child-rearing habits. When the PMC sympathized with the plight of masses of working people, it also pioneered professional standards of research grounded in professional organizations like the American Medical Association, the Association of University Professors, and all the professional organizations that currently dominate academic life. In organizing professional life, the PMC tried to protect the integrity of specialists and experts against the power of capitalists and the markets.. Those heady days of PMC heroism are long gone. The PMC, with its professional discipline and aura of disinterestedness, did very well for itself during the Depression, during World War II, and in the postwar period with the expansion of universities and the growing complexity of the American and social economic order.
“When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favour of capitalists it once despised.. The post-1968 PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live, and in large part, they have succeeded in destroying and building in its own image the physical and now cybernetic infrastructure of our everyday lives.
“As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history..
“Although the PMC is profoundly secular in nature, its rhetorical tone is pseudo-religious. While the PMC infuriates conservative Christians with its media monopoly on liberal righteousness, it finds salvation, like most Protestant sects, in material and earthly success. In liberal circles, talking about class or class consciousness before other forms of difference is not just controversial; it is heretical. They call you a “class reductionist” if you argue that race, gender, and class are not interchangeable categories. They pile on with the legalistic and deadly term intersectional to accommodate the materialist critique of their politics.
“The PMC simply does not want its class identity or interests unmasked. Young people wanting to enter what the Ehrenreichs called the “liberal professions” and gain positions in academia and the culture and media industries have had to adapt themselves to the Procrustean bed of PMC-dominated networks of influence..
“It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background décor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people. PMC centrism is a powerful ideology. Its priorities in research and innovation have been shaped more and more by corporate interests and the profit motive, while in the humanities and social sciences, scholars are rewarded by private foundations for their general disregard for historical knowledge, not to mention historical materialism.
“The rewards for following ruling-class directives are just too great, but the intellectual and psychic price that has to be paid for compliance should be too high for any member of society. In academia, the American PMC has achieved a great deal in establishing the rigors of peer review consensus and research autonomy, but we can no longer afford to defend its cherished principle of epistemological neutrality as a secret weapon against “extremism.” We live in a political, environmental, and social emergency: class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times.”
Academia has undoubtedly been problematic, but the last five years point an even more damning finger against science and scientism (“an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation”). As the author Ian Hall points out in his jeremiad against climate-change advocates, ‘Unsettled Science’, the scientific lobby was largely enabled by President Truman after America’s victory in the Second World War; the winding down of the Manhattan Project that helped develop the atom bomb led to 130,000 scientists being put out of work. And so began the era of government research contracts. This is not to say that all climate scientists are hopelessly conflicted by dint of their addiction to money from the ‘Big State’, only to suggest that, as Ian Hall advises, a philosophy of ‘follow the money’ may well explain some of the professional behaviours and strong feelings linked to the topic of climate change. When you’re paid to follow the party line, you follow the party line. Hall cites President Eisenhower in his parting address of 1961 (the emphasis is ours):
“Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Anthony Mann’s 1964 film ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’ – which this correspondent recently watched – is not, in truth, a terribly good treatment. Although it looks spectacular (it set a record, for example, for the largest outdoor film set ever made), the plot is haphazard and many of the performances are frankly second rate. It covers the rise and fall of Commodus (played by Christopher Plummer), son of the great Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (played by Alec Guinness) and nicely displays the internal corruption that led to Rome’s eventual fall. (Ridley Scott’s 2000 version ‘Gladiator’ covers similar ground, more entertainingly.) In its final moments, the honest general Gaius Livius (Stephen Boyd) leaves Rome having rejected its emperorship; a motley array of senators noisily offers exorbitant bribes to whichever remaining general will take up the throne on their behalf. “Three million dinars for the throne and the empire of Rome !” A concluding voiceover solemnly intones: “A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.”
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
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 also in systematic trend-following funds.
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