“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
- Thomas Paine, ‘The Crisis’, 23rd December 1776.
“Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.”
- Winston Churchill in an address to the pupils of Harrow School, 29th October 1941.
Get your Free
financial review
Of all the film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, that of Werner Herzog (1979’s ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’, with an unforgettable, expressionist Klaus Kinski in the title role) must surely be one of the most visually arresting. Roger Ebert describes Herzog’s depiction of nature, for example, as fearful and awesome; “It is not uplifting so much as remorseless. Clouds fall low and drift like water. Peaks tower in intimidation. Shadows hint at horrors. The simple peasants that Jonathan Harker encounters on his journey are not colourful and friendly, but withdraw from him. Herzog takes his time before allowing us our first sight of Dracula; his stage has been set by words and the looks in the eyes of people who cannot believe he is seeking the Count.” In the film’s later scenes, an almost ethereal Isabelle Adjani strides through the gloom and smoke of the plague-ridden Baltic city of Wismar, almost unconscious of the fact that the streets are teeming with rats. These sequences inevitably recall the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who promised to rid the German town of an infestation of rats, only to be cheated of his reward by the town’s mayor. In revenge, he plays his pipe to attract all of the town’s children away from their homes. In one version of the story, only three children escape, being respectively lame, deaf and blind.
As these cultural allusions might suggest, we find ourselves in dark times. Toby Rogers on Substack does a magnificent job of framing the problem as akin to a shift in the Earth’s magnetic poles. The difference being that since 2020, the shift has not been geospatial, but social:
“I struggle to find words to describe how weird the last four years have been. I’m now starting to think that Covid represents a SOCIAL pole switch worldwide. Perhaps it has happened before, perhaps it is the first social pole switch in history.
“Here is what I mean:
“Naomi Klein is the world’s leading expert on disaster capitalism. Covid represents the most extreme form of disaster capitalism in history. During Covid, Klein abandoned her work on disaster capitalism to support the fascist Trudeau administration as it inflicted disaster capitalism on Canadians at the behest of the World Economic Forum. Social pole switch.
“Nassim Taleb is the world’s leading expert on “black swans” (rare events with catastrophic, sometimes systems-destroying, outcomes). The development and release of SARS-CoV-2 and the mRNA vaccination campaigns are quintessential examples of black swan events. During Covid, Taleb abandoned his work on black swans to claim that we all must obey the policy makers who created these black swan events. Social pole switch.
“Noam Chomsky wrote the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The Covid response is the most extreme example of manufacturing consent in history with tens of billions of dollars spent on propaganda. During Covid, Noam Chomsky abandoned his work on manufacturing consent to argue that the unvaccinated should be locked in their homes and starved to death. Social pole switch.
“But the problem goes so far beyond these three grotesque examples to impact nearly all of the left, nearly all of the sciences, and nearly all of academia. It’s a worldwide phenomenon on the scale of a magnetic pole switch.
“Biology, chemistry, and medical schools were unable to think logically about origins, treatments, masks, lockdowns, etc. Centuries of stored knowledge and all of their training was for naught as they succumbed to fear and engaged in utter nonsense.
“The entire field of statistics, at universities across the developed world, was suddenly unable to do basic statistics. (John Ioannidis at Stanford was the rare exception.)
“Economics departments were unable to do basic cost benefit analyses anymore. As I wrote previously, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton literally said that deaths of despair would not happen during Covid lockdowns (and they were catastrophically wrong).
“Historians stopped doing history and ignored the lessons of the entire twentieth century. For example, one might think that the study of fascism would be illuminating for understanding the merger of state and corporate power in early 2020 but no mainstream historian would go there.
“Sociologists stopped studying culture and became automatons of the state.
“The mainstream news — the NY Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS — simply stopped reporting the news and repeated whatever the fascist Pharma state told them to say.
“All knowledge production industries stopped producing knowledge and fell in line to produce fascism, misery, and death to enrich the ruling class. It is as if the Enlightenment and the revolutions (scientific, political, and social) of the last two hundred and fifty years never happened.
“The political left became the authoritarian right as they abandoned “my body my choice” in favour of “the state owns your body and the air — shut up and obey.”
“The political right ushered in the largest expansion of government power in human history and acted as if state control of the economy is what they always believed.
“The entire social environment switched to its polar opposite.”
How did this extraordinary state of affairs come about ? Rogers has some theories:
“For most of the last two hundred and fifty years, the political left has been magnetically drawn to people, especially the poor, working class, and disadvantaged. The left could not help but feel for these people — the connection was emotional and physical. So whether it was the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria, or the women’s rights movement in the U.K., or the battles against environmental racism in the deep south, the political left was oriented by a magnetic connection to people and the planet; everyone in the movement just knew which direction to push because you could physically feel the direction of history.
“The introduction of fluoride into the drinking water supply in the 1950s caused perturbations in this social magnetic field (calcifying the pineal gland amongst other harms).
“The introduction of mass vaccination campaigns caused further disruptions of the magnetic field thus throwing confusion into the relationships between people.
“The widespread use of SSRI’s starting in the early 1990s and the vast deployment of electromagnetic fields for wireless (mobile phone) communication expanded this assault on the social magnetic field.
“Over time the field weakened.
“In 2019/2020 we got hit with a triple whammy — the release of SARS-CoV-2, the largest propaganda campaign in history, and the rollout of 5G. By this point, most progressives no longer had a working moral compass because the social magnetic field that formerly guided them was gone. They no longer felt a connection with the poor, working class, or the disadvantaged. The subaltern was objectified and viewed as unclean. The working class was turned into delivery drivers so that the laptop class could continue on with their Elysium lifestyle.
“Like bees hit with smoke, progressives floated around aimlessly. They were completely lacking in self-awareness and could not see the classism and racism in their own behaviour. They did not mourn their lack of connection with the people they formerly championed and instead turned the base into abstractions and props to be digitally manipulated however they wish. The real became plastic and no one could tell the difference anymore — because the social magnetic field had reversed.
“I’ve focused my ire on progressives but what I am describing here applies to all knowledge production fields over the last several years. Education, learning, and research only matter if they are grounded in the real. The purpose of scholarship should be to reduce suffering and improve well-being for real people. If one cannot feel the magnetic energy of others, one will be completely lost and unable to function. I argue that this disconnection is what happened to all knowledge production fields as a result of the waves of mass poisonings over the last seventy-five years.
“There is one more beat to this reversal in the social magnetic field. In the absence of a felt connection to others (the weakening of the field) the meritocratic class went looking for other ways to navigate the social environment. And what they settled on was winning (that’s the basis of the meritocracy after all — these people are winners!) And then somewhere along the way, navigating based on winning turned into domination. The magnetic field was reversed. Covid provided almost endless ways for the bourgeoisie to dominate others (lockdowns, mandates, surveillance, censorship, social distancing, masks, etc.). Those who formerly championed the disadvantaged became full-throated partisans calling for their enslavement and gradual extermination.
“Reversing all of this starts with ending the mass poisoning of humanity, detoxing our bodies, and returning to real food, clean water, and genuine connection with each other in the real world (not digital spaces). This is the work of the next 100 years.”
But we are not political advocates. Our day job is more specific – though not necessarily much easier, during a period of what often seem like ‘Potemkin markets’ in which prices are frequently wildly divorced from their underlying fundamentals. Our fiduciary duty is to protect and grow the irreplaceable assets that our clients have entrusted to us. This task is more than usually problematic given the environment that Toby Rogers describes above – and given that the governments of the West are grappling with a sovereign debt predicament that we suspect is utterly insoluble.
And we are not defeatists – we think we have a way through the fog. That journey today incorporates three types of investments:
- ‘Benjamin Graham’-style value stocks: shares of listed businesses run by principled, shareholder-friendly entrepreneurs who are excellent capital allocators, where those shares have, for whatever reason, become temporarily decoupled from their highly promising underlying fundamentals (notably cash-flow generation and little or no attendant debt);
- Systematic trend-following funds: funds managed by experienced managers, tracking price momentum opportunities (both higher and lower) across equity indices; currencies; interest rates and hard and soft commodities, thus offering a mixture of genuine asset class diversification as well as ‘crisis insurance’ given their flexibility to short markets as well as buy them;
- Real assets: tangible claims on the real economy, as opposed to politician’s promises, and exposure to hard assets like the monetary metals, gold and silver, which we consider offer exceptional opportunity in an environment of uncontrollable government debt issuance and the possibility of a looming monetary reset.
In short, at a time when governments have shown themselves unworthy of the people’s trust, we want to have nothing to do with them. And when so many large corporations have abused quasi-monopolistic positions in society for questionable social benefit, we favour working with genuine wealth-creators, capital allocators and entrepreneurs instead.
As for the piper – this time, he has not been cheated. He has, in all his various corporate and political forms, cheated society at large. He has already been paid. And he has extorted a terrible price from all of us.
………….
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.
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
“Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.”
Get your Free
financial review
Of all the film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, that of Werner Herzog (1979’s ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’, with an unforgettable, expressionist Klaus Kinski in the title role) must surely be one of the most visually arresting. Roger Ebert describes Herzog’s depiction of nature, for example, as fearful and awesome; “It is not uplifting so much as remorseless. Clouds fall low and drift like water. Peaks tower in intimidation. Shadows hint at horrors. The simple peasants that Jonathan Harker encounters on his journey are not colourful and friendly, but withdraw from him. Herzog takes his time before allowing us our first sight of Dracula; his stage has been set by words and the looks in the eyes of people who cannot believe he is seeking the Count.” In the film’s later scenes, an almost ethereal Isabelle Adjani strides through the gloom and smoke of the plague-ridden Baltic city of Wismar, almost unconscious of the fact that the streets are teeming with rats. These sequences inevitably recall the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who promised to rid the German town of an infestation of rats, only to be cheated of his reward by the town’s mayor. In revenge, he plays his pipe to attract all of the town’s children away from their homes. In one version of the story, only three children escape, being respectively lame, deaf and blind.
As these cultural allusions might suggest, we find ourselves in dark times. Toby Rogers on Substack does a magnificent job of framing the problem as akin to a shift in the Earth’s magnetic poles. The difference being that since 2020, the shift has not been geospatial, but social:
“I struggle to find words to describe how weird the last four years have been. I’m now starting to think that Covid represents a SOCIAL pole switch worldwide. Perhaps it has happened before, perhaps it is the first social pole switch in history.
“Here is what I mean:
“Naomi Klein is the world’s leading expert on disaster capitalism. Covid represents the most extreme form of disaster capitalism in history. During Covid, Klein abandoned her work on disaster capitalism to support the fascist Trudeau administration as it inflicted disaster capitalism on Canadians at the behest of the World Economic Forum. Social pole switch.
“Nassim Taleb is the world’s leading expert on “black swans” (rare events with catastrophic, sometimes systems-destroying, outcomes). The development and release of SARS-CoV-2 and the mRNA vaccination campaigns are quintessential examples of black swan events. During Covid, Taleb abandoned his work on black swans to claim that we all must obey the policy makers who created these black swan events. Social pole switch.
“Noam Chomsky wrote the book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The Covid response is the most extreme example of manufacturing consent in history with tens of billions of dollars spent on propaganda. During Covid, Noam Chomsky abandoned his work on manufacturing consent to argue that the unvaccinated should be locked in their homes and starved to death. Social pole switch.
“But the problem goes so far beyond these three grotesque examples to impact nearly all of the left, nearly all of the sciences, and nearly all of academia. It’s a worldwide phenomenon on the scale of a magnetic pole switch.
“Biology, chemistry, and medical schools were unable to think logically about origins, treatments, masks, lockdowns, etc. Centuries of stored knowledge and all of their training was for naught as they succumbed to fear and engaged in utter nonsense.
“The entire field of statistics, at universities across the developed world, was suddenly unable to do basic statistics. (John Ioannidis at Stanford was the rare exception.)
“Economics departments were unable to do basic cost benefit analyses anymore. As I wrote previously, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton literally said that deaths of despair would not happen during Covid lockdowns (and they were catastrophically wrong).
“Historians stopped doing history and ignored the lessons of the entire twentieth century. For example, one might think that the study of fascism would be illuminating for understanding the merger of state and corporate power in early 2020 but no mainstream historian would go there.
“Sociologists stopped studying culture and became automatons of the state.
“The mainstream news — the NY Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS — simply stopped reporting the news and repeated whatever the fascist Pharma state told them to say.
“All knowledge production industries stopped producing knowledge and fell in line to produce fascism, misery, and death to enrich the ruling class. It is as if the Enlightenment and the revolutions (scientific, political, and social) of the last two hundred and fifty years never happened.
“The political left became the authoritarian right as they abandoned “my body my choice” in favour of “the state owns your body and the air — shut up and obey.”
“The political right ushered in the largest expansion of government power in human history and acted as if state control of the economy is what they always believed.
“The entire social environment switched to its polar opposite.”
How did this extraordinary state of affairs come about ? Rogers has some theories:
“For most of the last two hundred and fifty years, the political left has been magnetically drawn to people, especially the poor, working class, and disadvantaged. The left could not help but feel for these people — the connection was emotional and physical. So whether it was the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria, or the women’s rights movement in the U.K., or the battles against environmental racism in the deep south, the political left was oriented by a magnetic connection to people and the planet; everyone in the movement just knew which direction to push because you could physically feel the direction of history.
“The introduction of fluoride into the drinking water supply in the 1950s caused perturbations in this social magnetic field (calcifying the pineal gland amongst other harms).
“The introduction of mass vaccination campaigns caused further disruptions of the magnetic field thus throwing confusion into the relationships between people.
“The widespread use of SSRI’s starting in the early 1990s and the vast deployment of electromagnetic fields for wireless (mobile phone) communication expanded this assault on the social magnetic field.
“Over time the field weakened.
“In 2019/2020 we got hit with a triple whammy — the release of SARS-CoV-2, the largest propaganda campaign in history, and the rollout of 5G. By this point, most progressives no longer had a working moral compass because the social magnetic field that formerly guided them was gone. They no longer felt a connection with the poor, working class, or the disadvantaged. The subaltern was objectified and viewed as unclean. The working class was turned into delivery drivers so that the laptop class could continue on with their Elysium lifestyle.
“Like bees hit with smoke, progressives floated around aimlessly. They were completely lacking in self-awareness and could not see the classism and racism in their own behaviour. They did not mourn their lack of connection with the people they formerly championed and instead turned the base into abstractions and props to be digitally manipulated however they wish. The real became plastic and no one could tell the difference anymore — because the social magnetic field had reversed.
“I’ve focused my ire on progressives but what I am describing here applies to all knowledge production fields over the last several years. Education, learning, and research only matter if they are grounded in the real. The purpose of scholarship should be to reduce suffering and improve well-being for real people. If one cannot feel the magnetic energy of others, one will be completely lost and unable to function. I argue that this disconnection is what happened to all knowledge production fields as a result of the waves of mass poisonings over the last seventy-five years.
“There is one more beat to this reversal in the social magnetic field. In the absence of a felt connection to others (the weakening of the field) the meritocratic class went looking for other ways to navigate the social environment. And what they settled on was winning (that’s the basis of the meritocracy after all — these people are winners!) And then somewhere along the way, navigating based on winning turned into domination. The magnetic field was reversed. Covid provided almost endless ways for the bourgeoisie to dominate others (lockdowns, mandates, surveillance, censorship, social distancing, masks, etc.). Those who formerly championed the disadvantaged became full-throated partisans calling for their enslavement and gradual extermination.
“Reversing all of this starts with ending the mass poisoning of humanity, detoxing our bodies, and returning to real food, clean water, and genuine connection with each other in the real world (not digital spaces). This is the work of the next 100 years.”
But we are not political advocates. Our day job is more specific – though not necessarily much easier, during a period of what often seem like ‘Potemkin markets’ in which prices are frequently wildly divorced from their underlying fundamentals. Our fiduciary duty is to protect and grow the irreplaceable assets that our clients have entrusted to us. This task is more than usually problematic given the environment that Toby Rogers describes above – and given that the governments of the West are grappling with a sovereign debt predicament that we suspect is utterly insoluble.
And we are not defeatists – we think we have a way through the fog. That journey today incorporates three types of investments:
In short, at a time when governments have shown themselves unworthy of the people’s trust, we want to have nothing to do with them. And when so many large corporations have abused quasi-monopolistic positions in society for questionable social benefit, we favour working with genuine wealth-creators, capital allocators and entrepreneurs instead.
As for the piper – this time, he has not been cheated. He has, in all his various corporate and political forms, cheated society at large. He has already been paid. And he has extorted a terrible price from all of us.
………….
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.
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