“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always.”
Get your Free
financial review
In December 2020, a remarkable book was published. It was called ‘180 degrees: unlearn the lies you’ve been taught to believe’ and its pseudonymous author was ‘Feargus O’Connor Greenwood’ – a name presumably inspired by the 19th century Irish Chartist. We were made aware of it by an interview with Richard Vobes, which inspired us to rush off and binge read the publication ourselves. You can listen to our subsequent interview with the author here.
Lest we be accused of bias, here are some third party reviews of ‘180 degrees’ culled from Amazon:
“The best book I’ve ever read . It should be compulsory reading for everyone. As a book a day person and at 75 years of age I’m wondering why everyone is not receptive to this. Changed my total way of thinking.”
“Wish I’d had this book when I was growing up, I’ve always questioned everything. It should be a must read for school age children. Just confirm everything I already knew. My grandson is reading it next, he needs to keep his mind open & question everything.”
“This book is certainly the best book I’ve ever read. It’s very well written and as such an easy read, albeit some of the content is the hardest subject to broach. I was expecting a chapter that turned out to be chapter 9 to appear here and it’s tough, but we all have to face the raw facts for us to deal with that darkness controlling this world. To be fair I was born knowing these days were ahead and I’ve not learnt anything new other than the names involved and the minutia details. And yet I still regard this book as the best I’ve read. Or more accurately, THE crucial book we all have to read. Now that in itself is testament on how perfect these subjects have been addressed. This book is a MUST read for all none psychopaths.”
“A must-read for anyone who is curious and open-minded.”
“This book is an absolute must-have if you feel that what you’ve always been doesn’t make sense. It has opened my eyes and has set me on a journey to investigate exactly what is happening and who and how we are being controlled.”
“This book is so informative and thorough. I couldn’t put it down. So much sense, it is horrifying in its truth. Wake up.”
Two caveats. The book is extremely disturbing in places. (The truth, or what we may now believe to be the truth, can hurt.) And it’s a beast of a book, running to 800 pages of largely explosive prose. But as many reviewers have pointed out, it’s also an easy read by way of style and argument. It is meticulously researched. Suffice to say, this correspondent thoroughly recommends it. If you ‘enjoy’ it, or at least appreciate it, send a few copies to friends who may be yet to wake up.
If you prefer what is essentially a brief distillation of much of the financial thrust of ‘180 degrees’, consider the following thread from ‘Capitalist Exploits’ (@capitalistexp on Twitter / X):
“If you knew you were sitting at the helm of a collapse in financial markets, which would bring social unrest and likely displace your position of power what would you have done?
“This was the problem facing the elites in fall of 2019. Recall the repo crisis? The emergency debt crisis, which was the result of problems papered over since 08.
“Desperate attempts to save the system were enacted (Fed funding repo markets to tune of 10-20B p/d). It was so desperate that even treasuries were being rejected as collateral.
“We hedgies, analysts, fin mkt guys/gals all knew the system was going to collapse. So did the elites. Collapse threatened them.
“The scam that cannot be named was the veil for ushering in “The great reset”. An ability to crush small biz and destroy the middle class (who represent the greatest threat to totalitarian rule), print trillions of dollars, give it to themselves while controlling the collapse.
“Collapse is necessary for them to enable and justify a techno feudal system – “build back better”. A system where all assets are owned by those at the helm of the destruction – “You’ll own nothing and be happy”. Classic Hegelian dialectic.
“Obvious at this point to all but the truly brainwashed or desperately naive is that there was no medical emergency. Only a mass MSM manufactured crisis, coupled with censorship never before seen (necessary to enable the transfer of wealth to elites..now done).
“Groundwork was carefully laid for biomedical security state (passport systems, psychological NLP, much greater amt of work moved to online/digital). This is where the next manufactured crisis is to come. Corralling all those in digital system into something “safe and secure”.
“A digital ID. To be tied in with CBDC’s, controlling spend (programmable money), “social credit/ESG” and vax passports. – Controlled spend, – Controlled movement/travel. See 15 min cities. – Controlled health – if you don’t comply with measures you’ll be cut off from payments.
“Payments being UBI. Dependancy is being established now. Post dependancy comes UBI. Soon as you’re reliant on UBI you’re a slave to the entire structure.
“If you wish to know who is behind what is the greatest organised crime syndicate ever seen and behind what is a global war where citizens are both victim and weapon begin by looking at “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
“Numbers don’t lie and we are already in a genocide. (excess mortality post “safe and effective”) Don’t @ me; do your own analysis. Welcome to WWIII. It’s already here…but not in the way any of us ever envisaged.
“What now? Well, it must be stopped. Start local. The time for fearing ridicule is long past. Be brave, speak the truth. Understand an entire bag of “emergencies” are in the wings. We must be awake to these and shut them down immediately.. before we’re all enslaved. – End.”
This correspondent realised that something had gone badly wrong with the entire world of money during the Global Financial Crisis. What he failed to appreciate until Brexit and then the Covid crisis was that the same sort of poisonous immoral rot had infected healthcare; media; education; the judiciary; parliament.. It is bad enough that our supposed leaders are luxuriating in economic and cultural idiocy. What makes the problem almost infinitely worse is that such idiocy may not be happening by accident but entirely by design.
We recently described the economic situation as ‘Potemkin World’ – in which everything is fabricated and nothing can be trusted. There were early hopes that Trump 2.0 in alliance with DOGE might be able to help at least the US fiscal supertanker to ‘course correct’, but like so many other politicians’ promises, those hopes have evaporated on contact with political and Deep State reality. The unavoidable collapse of the entire system increasingly looks to be a feature, not a bug.
Here is what we said during the early months of the Bataan Death March that the UK has now become under Starmer’s Labour administration. We first cited James Vitali for ‘The Spectator’:
“Over the last fourteen years, the Conservatives have been the ostensibly reluctant midwives of a bigger, more interventionist state. But advocates of ‘securonomics’ genuinely believe in one.
“The Autumn Budget was the policy manifestation of this economic worldview, and the first opportunity for Reeves to put ‘securonomics’ into practice. In concrete terms, what the Chancellor has done this week is instigate a profound transfer of resources away from productive parts of the economy and towards the state.
“The Chancellor’s tax rises are in cash terms the largest in history. And while increased investment is the broader theme of her budgetary decisions, that large quantum of extra tax revenue will go towards boosting spending on the day-to-day operations of a larger and more active state.
“The Budget has also reinforced a shift in decision-making authority away from households and businesses and into the hands of government. The government will now dictate to a greater extent the conditions under which businesses can take on workers. By ramping up borrowing by £142 billion over the forecast period, the government is also indicating its confidence that it can make superior investment decisions to private enterprises. And this is ultimately why they are changing the debt measure too; to facilitate an expanded role for an active state through increased borrowing..
“Across the decisions made during the Budget, the Chancellor has conducted ‘a hands-on rebalancing between market forces and state control, tipping more power towards the latter’. Investment needs to have ‘guardrails’, so that it advances the political ends of the government. Risk taking by businesses needs to be regulated, so that the state can guarantee the security of workers. Money needs to be shifted from businesses to the government, because the latter knows how to spend it better.
“This is, of course, but a rearticulation of a very old economic dogma – that in a complex society, the government can make better decisions than you can. That the welfare state can better provide for people’s security than households savings and private investment can. And as surely as night follows day, its practical effects when acted upon will be the same – inflation, higher taxes, and wealth destruction.”
As we wrote at the time,
“With the chaos and vitriol of the US Presidential campaign now (hopefully) behind us, shrewder heads can start to consider the intractable problem that both candidates never publicly addressed: an unpayable dimension of debt. As Matthew Lynn for ‘The Telegraph’ fairly points out (‘We may be heading for a new financial crisis’), this problem is not isolated to any one country; it is properly global in scale (and consequent insolubility):
“In Britain, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is facing a bond market revolt after her half-baked, misjudged Budget. On the other side of the Channel, Michel Barnier, the French prime minister, is scrabbling around desperately for any extra tax revenues he can get his hands on to keep the credit ratings agencies on board..
“In the UK, it would be easy to focus just on the chaos in the gilt market this week. And yet, in reality, something far more serious is underway, and it is happening across the world. The financial markets are rebelling against overspending governments – and that means we are in for a long spell of financial turbulence and potentially a full-blown crisis..
“Investors crunched through the numbers, rumbled that she would not get nearly as much from her tax rises as she hoped for, worked out that her “fiscal rules” were completely bogus, and promptly started demanding more for holding the vast quantities of debt she plans to issue over the next few years.
“If Reeves was even a quarter as clever as she keeps claiming she is, she would not have been taken by surprise. She would have figured out this was the worst possible moment to tax, borrow and spend more.
“It is a mistake to be too parochial. The backlash against this Budget is simply part of a global trend. Driven by Left-leaning bodies such as the IMF, many political leaders fell for the line that the markets automatically supported bigger government..
“Perhaps most importantly of all, Wall Street is starting to worry about the stability of the American government’s debt, with bond yields hitting a three-month high over the last week even as the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates (which means yields should be going down). It has become clear that neither candidate in next week’s presidential election has any plans to reduce a deficit already running at 6pc of GDP and might even increase spending further.
“Add it all up, and one point is clear. The bond markets are now turning ruthlessly on big-spending governments. They are no longer willing to finance every programme a president or finance minister wants to launch, and will charge a huge premium unless deficits are kept under strict control. They are starting to worry that governments have reached the limit of potential tax revenues.
“In France, for example, the state already collects 48pc of GDP in tax, and it is very hard to believe Barnier can get that over the 50pc line no matter how hard he tries. In Britain, even Attlee in the 1940s didn’t manage to squeeze the 44pc of GDP in tax that Reeves has planned..
“Back in the 1990s, when the bond vigilantes reigned supreme, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political adviser, used to joke that he hoped to be reincarnated as the bond market because “you can intimidate everybody”. That is about to be true all over again, and even more ferociously than in the Clinton era.
“So far we have only seen the first skirmishes, but we are about to witness an epic clash between governments and investors. The result will be huge volatility and potentially a full-scale crash.”
These problems were all visible. We were able to identify them. So as discretionary investment managers we responded by a) avoiding all forms of government debt entirely, and b) focusing on productive and inflation-hedging investments, including gold and silver and related mining interests on attractive valuations. Thus far, this approach has served us and our clients well.
We may be living in an economic and financial Potemkin World, a world turned upside down, but the assets we own are real.
………….
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.
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always.”
Get your Free
financial review
In December 2020, a remarkable book was published. It was called ‘180 degrees: unlearn the lies you’ve been taught to believe’ and its pseudonymous author was ‘Feargus O’Connor Greenwood’ – a name presumably inspired by the 19th century Irish Chartist. We were made aware of it by an interview with Richard Vobes, which inspired us to rush off and binge read the publication ourselves. You can listen to our subsequent interview with the author here.
Lest we be accused of bias, here are some third party reviews of ‘180 degrees’ culled from Amazon:
“The best book I’ve ever read . It should be compulsory reading for everyone. As a book a day person and at 75 years of age I’m wondering why everyone is not receptive to this. Changed my total way of thinking.”
“Wish I’d had this book when I was growing up, I’ve always questioned everything. It should be a must read for school age children. Just confirm everything I already knew. My grandson is reading it next, he needs to keep his mind open & question everything.”
“This book is certainly the best book I’ve ever read. It’s very well written and as such an easy read, albeit some of the content is the hardest subject to broach. I was expecting a chapter that turned out to be chapter 9 to appear here and it’s tough, but we all have to face the raw facts for us to deal with that darkness controlling this world. To be fair I was born knowing these days were ahead and I’ve not learnt anything new other than the names involved and the minutia details. And yet I still regard this book as the best I’ve read. Or more accurately, THE crucial book we all have to read. Now that in itself is testament on how perfect these subjects have been addressed. This book is a MUST read for all none psychopaths.”
“A must-read for anyone who is curious and open-minded.”
“This book is an absolute must-have if you feel that what you’ve always been doesn’t make sense. It has opened my eyes and has set me on a journey to investigate exactly what is happening and who and how we are being controlled.”
“This book is so informative and thorough. I couldn’t put it down. So much sense, it is horrifying in its truth. Wake up.”
Two caveats. The book is extremely disturbing in places. (The truth, or what we may now believe to be the truth, can hurt.) And it’s a beast of a book, running to 800 pages of largely explosive prose. But as many reviewers have pointed out, it’s also an easy read by way of style and argument. It is meticulously researched. Suffice to say, this correspondent thoroughly recommends it. If you ‘enjoy’ it, or at least appreciate it, send a few copies to friends who may be yet to wake up.
If you prefer what is essentially a brief distillation of much of the financial thrust of ‘180 degrees’, consider the following thread from ‘Capitalist Exploits’ (@capitalistexp on Twitter / X):
“If you knew you were sitting at the helm of a collapse in financial markets, which would bring social unrest and likely displace your position of power what would you have done?
“This was the problem facing the elites in fall of 2019. Recall the repo crisis? The emergency debt crisis, which was the result of problems papered over since 08.
“Desperate attempts to save the system were enacted (Fed funding repo markets to tune of 10-20B p/d). It was so desperate that even treasuries were being rejected as collateral.
“We hedgies, analysts, fin mkt guys/gals all knew the system was going to collapse. So did the elites. Collapse threatened them.
“The scam that cannot be named was the veil for ushering in “The great reset”. An ability to crush small biz and destroy the middle class (who represent the greatest threat to totalitarian rule), print trillions of dollars, give it to themselves while controlling the collapse.
“Collapse is necessary for them to enable and justify a techno feudal system – “build back better”. A system where all assets are owned by those at the helm of the destruction – “You’ll own nothing and be happy”. Classic Hegelian dialectic.
“Obvious at this point to all but the truly brainwashed or desperately naive is that there was no medical emergency. Only a mass MSM manufactured crisis, coupled with censorship never before seen (necessary to enable the transfer of wealth to elites..now done).
“Groundwork was carefully laid for biomedical security state (passport systems, psychological NLP, much greater amt of work moved to online/digital). This is where the next manufactured crisis is to come. Corralling all those in digital system into something “safe and secure”.
“A digital ID. To be tied in with CBDC’s, controlling spend (programmable money), “social credit/ESG” and vax passports. – Controlled spend, – Controlled movement/travel. See 15 min cities. – Controlled health – if you don’t comply with measures you’ll be cut off from payments.
“Payments being UBI. Dependancy is being established now. Post dependancy comes UBI. Soon as you’re reliant on UBI you’re a slave to the entire structure.
“If you wish to know who is behind what is the greatest organised crime syndicate ever seen and behind what is a global war where citizens are both victim and weapon begin by looking at “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
“Numbers don’t lie and we are already in a genocide. (excess mortality post “safe and effective”) Don’t @ me; do your own analysis. Welcome to WWIII. It’s already here…but not in the way any of us ever envisaged.
“What now? Well, it must be stopped. Start local. The time for fearing ridicule is long past. Be brave, speak the truth. Understand an entire bag of “emergencies” are in the wings. We must be awake to these and shut them down immediately.. before we’re all enslaved. – End.”
This correspondent realised that something had gone badly wrong with the entire world of money during the Global Financial Crisis. What he failed to appreciate until Brexit and then the Covid crisis was that the same sort of poisonous immoral rot had infected healthcare; media; education; the judiciary; parliament.. It is bad enough that our supposed leaders are luxuriating in economic and cultural idiocy. What makes the problem almost infinitely worse is that such idiocy may not be happening by accident but entirely by design.
We recently described the economic situation as ‘Potemkin World’ – in which everything is fabricated and nothing can be trusted. There were early hopes that Trump 2.0 in alliance with DOGE might be able to help at least the US fiscal supertanker to ‘course correct’, but like so many other politicians’ promises, those hopes have evaporated on contact with political and Deep State reality. The unavoidable collapse of the entire system increasingly looks to be a feature, not a bug.
Here is what we said during the early months of the Bataan Death March that the UK has now become under Starmer’s Labour administration. We first cited James Vitali for ‘The Spectator’:
“Over the last fourteen years, the Conservatives have been the ostensibly reluctant midwives of a bigger, more interventionist state. But advocates of ‘securonomics’ genuinely believe in one.
“The Autumn Budget was the policy manifestation of this economic worldview, and the first opportunity for Reeves to put ‘securonomics’ into practice. In concrete terms, what the Chancellor has done this week is instigate a profound transfer of resources away from productive parts of the economy and towards the state.
“The Chancellor’s tax rises are in cash terms the largest in history. And while increased investment is the broader theme of her budgetary decisions, that large quantum of extra tax revenue will go towards boosting spending on the day-to-day operations of a larger and more active state.
“The Budget has also reinforced a shift in decision-making authority away from households and businesses and into the hands of government. The government will now dictate to a greater extent the conditions under which businesses can take on workers. By ramping up borrowing by £142 billion over the forecast period, the government is also indicating its confidence that it can make superior investment decisions to private enterprises. And this is ultimately why they are changing the debt measure too; to facilitate an expanded role for an active state through increased borrowing..
“Across the decisions made during the Budget, the Chancellor has conducted ‘a hands-on rebalancing between market forces and state control, tipping more power towards the latter’. Investment needs to have ‘guardrails’, so that it advances the political ends of the government. Risk taking by businesses needs to be regulated, so that the state can guarantee the security of workers. Money needs to be shifted from businesses to the government, because the latter knows how to spend it better.
“This is, of course, but a rearticulation of a very old economic dogma – that in a complex society, the government can make better decisions than you can. That the welfare state can better provide for people’s security than households savings and private investment can. And as surely as night follows day, its practical effects when acted upon will be the same – inflation, higher taxes, and wealth destruction.”
As we wrote at the time,
“With the chaos and vitriol of the US Presidential campaign now (hopefully) behind us, shrewder heads can start to consider the intractable problem that both candidates never publicly addressed: an unpayable dimension of debt. As Matthew Lynn for ‘The Telegraph’ fairly points out (‘We may be heading for a new financial crisis’), this problem is not isolated to any one country; it is properly global in scale (and consequent insolubility):
“In Britain, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is facing a bond market revolt after her half-baked, misjudged Budget. On the other side of the Channel, Michel Barnier, the French prime minister, is scrabbling around desperately for any extra tax revenues he can get his hands on to keep the credit ratings agencies on board..
“In the UK, it would be easy to focus just on the chaos in the gilt market this week. And yet, in reality, something far more serious is underway, and it is happening across the world. The financial markets are rebelling against overspending governments – and that means we are in for a long spell of financial turbulence and potentially a full-blown crisis..
“Investors crunched through the numbers, rumbled that she would not get nearly as much from her tax rises as she hoped for, worked out that her “fiscal rules” were completely bogus, and promptly started demanding more for holding the vast quantities of debt she plans to issue over the next few years.
“If Reeves was even a quarter as clever as she keeps claiming she is, she would not have been taken by surprise. She would have figured out this was the worst possible moment to tax, borrow and spend more.
“It is a mistake to be too parochial. The backlash against this Budget is simply part of a global trend. Driven by Left-leaning bodies such as the IMF, many political leaders fell for the line that the markets automatically supported bigger government..
“Perhaps most importantly of all, Wall Street is starting to worry about the stability of the American government’s debt, with bond yields hitting a three-month high over the last week even as the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates (which means yields should be going down). It has become clear that neither candidate in next week’s presidential election has any plans to reduce a deficit already running at 6pc of GDP and might even increase spending further.
“Add it all up, and one point is clear. The bond markets are now turning ruthlessly on big-spending governments. They are no longer willing to finance every programme a president or finance minister wants to launch, and will charge a huge premium unless deficits are kept under strict control. They are starting to worry that governments have reached the limit of potential tax revenues.
“In France, for example, the state already collects 48pc of GDP in tax, and it is very hard to believe Barnier can get that over the 50pc line no matter how hard he tries. In Britain, even Attlee in the 1940s didn’t manage to squeeze the 44pc of GDP in tax that Reeves has planned..
“Back in the 1990s, when the bond vigilantes reigned supreme, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s political adviser, used to joke that he hoped to be reincarnated as the bond market because “you can intimidate everybody”. That is about to be true all over again, and even more ferociously than in the Clinton era.
“So far we have only seen the first skirmishes, but we are about to witness an epic clash between governments and investors. The result will be huge volatility and potentially a full-scale crash.”
These problems were all visible. We were able to identify them. So as discretionary investment managers we responded by a) avoiding all forms of government debt entirely, and b) focusing on productive and inflation-hedging investments, including gold and silver and related mining interests on attractive valuations. Thus far, this approach has served us and our clients well.
We may be living in an economic and financial Potemkin World, a world turned upside down, but the assets we own are real.
………….
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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