“What you’re feeling isn’t a temporary high – it’s the relief from the crushing burden of the state, which was getting heavier by the day.”
- Tweet by Naval Ravikant, 11th November 2024.
“Kamala Harris had a billion dollars to win an election. She gave it all to millionaires and ended up 20 million in debt. And that, my friends, is exactly how she was going to run the country.”
- Tweet by Five Times August, 11th November 2024.
“The global Covid response was the turning point in public trust, economic vitality, citizen health, free speech, literacy, religious and travel freedom, elite credibility, demographic longevity, and so much more. Now five years following the initial spread of the virus that provoked the largest-scale despotisms of our lives, something else seems to be biting the dust: the postwar neo-liberal consensus itself.
“The world as we knew it only a decade ago is on fire, precisely as Henry Kissinger warned in one of his last published articles. Nations are erecting new trade barriers and dealing with citizen uprisings like we’ve never seen before, some peaceful, some violent, and most that could go either way. On the other side of this upheaval lies the answer to the great question: what does political revolution look like in advanced industrial economies with democratic institutions? We are in the process of finding out..
“[Our manufacturing] industries came to be largely replaced by debt-financed financial products, the explosion of the government-backed medical sector, information systems, entertainment, and government-funded education, while the primary exports of the US became debt and petroleum products.
“Many forces combined to sweep Donald Trump into office in 2016 but resentment against the internationalization of manufacturing was high among them. As financialization replaced domestic manufacturing, and class mobility stagnated, a political alignment took shape in the US that stunned the elites. Trump got busy on his pet issue, namely erecting trade barriers against countries with whom the US was running trade deficits, primarily China.
“By 2018, and in response to new tariffs, the volume of trade with China took its first huge hit, reversing not only a 40-year trajectory of growth but also dealing the first the biggest blow against the 70-year postwar consensus of the neo-liberal world. Trump was doing it largely on his own initiative and against the wishes of many generations of statesmen, diplomats, academics, and corporate elites.
“Then something happened to reverse the reversal. That something was the Covid response..
“It’s impossible to imagine the pain that decision must have caused Trump because this move meant a repudiation of all that he believed in foundationally and all that he set out to accomplish as president..
“The irony, then, is a salient one: the aborted attempt to restart the neo-liberal order, if that is what it was, occurred in the midst of a global bout of totalitarian controls and restrictions. To what extent were the Covid lockdowns deployed in service of resisting Trump’s decoupling agenda? We have no answers to that question but observing the pattern does leave room for speculation..
“The neo-liberal order was never liberal in the traditional sense. It was managed from the outset by states under US dominance. The architecture was always more fragile than it appeared to be. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, tightened through the decades, involved nascent institutions of global banking and included a US-managed monetary system that broke down in 1971 and was replaced by a fiat-dollar system. The flaw in both systems had a similar root. They established global money but retained national fiscal and regulatory systems, which thereby disabled the specie-flow mechanisms that smoothed and balanced trade in the 19th century.
“One of the consequences was the manufacturing losses mentioned above, which coincided with a growing public perception that the institutions of government and finance were operating without transparency and citizen participation. The ballooning of the security state after 9-11 and the stunning bailouts of Wall Street after 2008 reinforced the point and set the stage for a populist revolt. The lockdowns – disproportionately benefitting elites – plus the burning of cities with the riots of the summer of 2020, the vaccine mandates, and combined with the onset of a migrant crisis, reinforced the point.
“In the US, the panic and frenzy all surround Trump but that leaves unexplained why almost every Western country is dealing with the same dynamic. Today the core political fight in the world today concerns nation-states and the populist movements driving them versus the kind of globalism that brought a worldwide response to the virus as well as the worldwide migrant crisis. Both efforts failed spectacularly, most especially the attempt to vaccinate the entire population with a shot that is only defended today by manufacturers and those in their pay..
“Despite the failure of global management last century, in the 21st century, we’ve seen the intensification of the power of globalist institutions. The World Health Organization (WHO) effectively scripted the pandemic response for the world. Globalist foundations and NGOs seem to be heavily involved in the migrant crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, created as nascent institutions for a global system of money and finance, are exercising outsized influence on monetary and financial policy. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is working to diminish the power of the nation-state over trade policies..
“Entrenched globalism of the sort that operates in the 21st century represents a shift against and repudiation of half a millennium of the way governance has worked in practice..
“The world today is packed with wealthy institutions and individuals that stand in revolt against the ideas of freedom and democracy. They do not like the idea of geographically constrained states with zones of juridical power. They believe they have a global mission and want to empower global institutions against the sovereignty of people living in nation-states.
“They say that there are existential problems that require the overthrow of the nation-state model of governance. They have a list: infectious disease, pandemic threats, climate change, peacekeeping, cybercrime, financial stability, and the threat of instability, and I’m sure there are others on the list that we’ve yet to see. The idea is that these are necessarily worldwide and evade the capacity of the nation-state to deal with them.
“We are all being acculturated to believe that the nation-state is nothing but an anachronism that needs to be supplanted. Keep in mind that this necessarily means treating democracy and freedom as anachronisms too. In practice, the only means by which average people can restrain tyranny and despotism is through voting at the national level. None of us have any influence over the policies of the WHO, World Bank, or IMF, much less over the Gates or Soros Foundations. The way politics is structured in the world today, we are all necessarily disenfranchised in a world governed by global institutions.
“And that is precisely the point: to achieve universal disenfranchisement of average people so that the elites can have a free hand in regulating the planet as they see fit. This is why it becomes supremely urgent for every person who aspires to live in peace and freedom to regain national sovereignty and say no to the transfer of authority to institutions over which citizens have no control..
“There are plenty of reasons to regret the collapse of the neo-liberal consensus and a strong rationale to be concerned about the rise of protectionism and high tariffs. And yet what they called “free trade” (not the simple freedom to buy and sell across borders but rather a state-managed industrial plan) also came at a cost: the transference of sovereignty away from the people in their communities and nations to supranational institutions over which citizens have no control. It did not have to be this way but that is how it was constructed to be.
“For that reason, the neo-liberal consensus built in the postwar period contained the seeds of its own destruction. It was too dependent on the creation of institutions beyond people’s control and too reliant on elite mastery of events. It was already crumbling before the pandemic response but it was the Covid controls, nearly simultaneously imposed all over the world to underscore elite hegemony, that exposed the fist under the velvet glove..
“Many of us have long predicted a backlash to the lockdowns and all that was associated with them. The full scale of it none of us could have imagined. The drama of our times is as intense as any of history’s great epochs: the fall of Rome, the Great Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the fall of the multinational empires. The only question now is whether this ends like America 1776 or France 1790.”
Get your Free
financial review
It would now seem there was always a third option: a bloodless electoral landslide. Five years ago, in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, we wrote a piece called ‘A wrecking ball and a dearth of ideas’. In it we cited Robert Saunders of The New Statesman:
“When Theresa May, in 2017, promised “strong and stable leadership in the national interest”, she cannot have had this in mind. The long, agonised collapse of her premiership has left the Conservative Party in search of its sixth leader since the turn of the century and its third since 2016. The party has been crushed at the local elections and came fifth in the European Parliament elections, posting the lowest share of a national vote in its history. It has no legislative achievements since 2016, no discernible economic policy and no obvious vision for the future.”
Back then, we made the following observations:
“One of the strange beauties of the Brexit process is the wondrous nature of this wrecking ball as it takes on all comers in its game-changing attempts to demolish the British Establishment and subvert the wider status quo. Our relations with an overbearing and unaccountable EU ? Check. Quisling MPs ? Check. The BBC ? Check. Is there anything Brexit cannot endeavour to reset – the House of Lords; the influence of Big Business, big banks and crony capitalism; faith in the objectivity and even relevance of the mainstream media ?
“What the Brexit process has also revealed is the strange dearth of ideas at the heart of what were formerly our two main political parties. British Conservatism, suggests Robert Saunders,
“has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped “conserving”; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology. Historically, the Conservative Party has been a party of ideas, but not of ideology. Today, that relationship has been reversed: a party in thrall to ideology is reduced to boardroom banalities and half-remembered hymns to a Thatcherite past. Like an ageing Eighties tribute band, the party flubs wearily through the same tired playlist, barely noticing that the stadiums are empty, the hairstyles ludicrous and the fans long departed. In this sense, its Brexit woes are only the manifestation of a deeper problem: the closing of the Conservative mind.”
To paraphrase Amazon’s marketing call to action, those who liked Brexit’s wrecking ball will love Donald Trump’s. Whereas Trump Administration 1.0 was beset by the chaos of a confected pandemic, followed by a reflexive backlash by the Deep State, and then terminated by a Biden victory of dubious numerical provenance, Trump 2.0 promises more or less a clean sweep of the Augean Stables – a reversal of accumulated years of climate hustling, race hustling, gender hustling, and the complete repudiation of Marxist economic self-immolation, not least of green energy madness, masquerading as virtue-signalling political posturing. The sad remnants of the German economy (and government) serve as poster child for the baleful effects of Net Zero thinking on a political class incapable of mature thought.
The first obvious victim of Trump 2.0 – apart from the Democrat Party and its braying jackal puppet herself – was the legacy media, which spent the entire duration of the campaign busily digging its own grave of what now looks to be perpetual irrelevance. To say that the media landscape has shifted would be an understatement.
Big Tech (ex-Tesla and X, of course) and Big Pharma will presumably be amongst the next in the firing line. But both sectors may yet succumb to the forces of valuational gravity in the stock market before Supertrump gives them the duffing up they richly deserve.
But lest we get carried away on a cavalcade of Supertrump euphoria, it’s important to acknowledge that New Rome can’t be built overnight, and that seemingly insuperable problems – notably the US’ accumulated sovereign and federal debts – cannot be resolved simply by a stroke of the legislative pen. Trump Administration 2.0 can also expect concerted blowback from the Deep State, which will fight tooth and nail to resist incursions into its dark fiefdoms. (For these reasons we maintain our exposure to fiat currency and inflation hedges in the form of reasonably priced industrial and precious metals investments. We suspect that the foreseeable global – if not globalist – future will be one of competitive currency devaluations.)
Nevertheless, Trump 2.0 is clearly at least as much cause for celebration by libertarians, free speech advocates and free marketeers as Brexit was.
Annoying virtue signaller, fatuous globalist and once relevant musician Bono pledged to drive his car off a cliff if Donald Trump won the US 2024 Presidential election. That wrecking ball is most definitely back. With a vengeance.
………….
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.
“What you’re feeling isn’t a temporary high – it’s the relief from the crushing burden of the state, which was getting heavier by the day.”
“Kamala Harris had a billion dollars to win an election. She gave it all to millionaires and ended up 20 million in debt. And that, my friends, is exactly how she was going to run the country.”
“The global Covid response was the turning point in public trust, economic vitality, citizen health, free speech, literacy, religious and travel freedom, elite credibility, demographic longevity, and so much more. Now five years following the initial spread of the virus that provoked the largest-scale despotisms of our lives, something else seems to be biting the dust: the postwar neo-liberal consensus itself.
“The world as we knew it only a decade ago is on fire, precisely as Henry Kissinger warned in one of his last published articles. Nations are erecting new trade barriers and dealing with citizen uprisings like we’ve never seen before, some peaceful, some violent, and most that could go either way. On the other side of this upheaval lies the answer to the great question: what does political revolution look like in advanced industrial economies with democratic institutions? We are in the process of finding out..
“[Our manufacturing] industries came to be largely replaced by debt-financed financial products, the explosion of the government-backed medical sector, information systems, entertainment, and government-funded education, while the primary exports of the US became debt and petroleum products.
“Many forces combined to sweep Donald Trump into office in 2016 but resentment against the internationalization of manufacturing was high among them. As financialization replaced domestic manufacturing, and class mobility stagnated, a political alignment took shape in the US that stunned the elites. Trump got busy on his pet issue, namely erecting trade barriers against countries with whom the US was running trade deficits, primarily China.
“By 2018, and in response to new tariffs, the volume of trade with China took its first huge hit, reversing not only a 40-year trajectory of growth but also dealing the first the biggest blow against the 70-year postwar consensus of the neo-liberal world. Trump was doing it largely on his own initiative and against the wishes of many generations of statesmen, diplomats, academics, and corporate elites.
“Then something happened to reverse the reversal. That something was the Covid response..
“It’s impossible to imagine the pain that decision must have caused Trump because this move meant a repudiation of all that he believed in foundationally and all that he set out to accomplish as president..
“The irony, then, is a salient one: the aborted attempt to restart the neo-liberal order, if that is what it was, occurred in the midst of a global bout of totalitarian controls and restrictions. To what extent were the Covid lockdowns deployed in service of resisting Trump’s decoupling agenda? We have no answers to that question but observing the pattern does leave room for speculation..
“The neo-liberal order was never liberal in the traditional sense. It was managed from the outset by states under US dominance. The architecture was always more fragile than it appeared to be. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, tightened through the decades, involved nascent institutions of global banking and included a US-managed monetary system that broke down in 1971 and was replaced by a fiat-dollar system. The flaw in both systems had a similar root. They established global money but retained national fiscal and regulatory systems, which thereby disabled the specie-flow mechanisms that smoothed and balanced trade in the 19th century.
“One of the consequences was the manufacturing losses mentioned above, which coincided with a growing public perception that the institutions of government and finance were operating without transparency and citizen participation. The ballooning of the security state after 9-11 and the stunning bailouts of Wall Street after 2008 reinforced the point and set the stage for a populist revolt. The lockdowns – disproportionately benefitting elites – plus the burning of cities with the riots of the summer of 2020, the vaccine mandates, and combined with the onset of a migrant crisis, reinforced the point.
“In the US, the panic and frenzy all surround Trump but that leaves unexplained why almost every Western country is dealing with the same dynamic. Today the core political fight in the world today concerns nation-states and the populist movements driving them versus the kind of globalism that brought a worldwide response to the virus as well as the worldwide migrant crisis. Both efforts failed spectacularly, most especially the attempt to vaccinate the entire population with a shot that is only defended today by manufacturers and those in their pay..
“Despite the failure of global management last century, in the 21st century, we’ve seen the intensification of the power of globalist institutions. The World Health Organization (WHO) effectively scripted the pandemic response for the world. Globalist foundations and NGOs seem to be heavily involved in the migrant crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, created as nascent institutions for a global system of money and finance, are exercising outsized influence on monetary and financial policy. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is working to diminish the power of the nation-state over trade policies..
“Entrenched globalism of the sort that operates in the 21st century represents a shift against and repudiation of half a millennium of the way governance has worked in practice..
“The world today is packed with wealthy institutions and individuals that stand in revolt against the ideas of freedom and democracy. They do not like the idea of geographically constrained states with zones of juridical power. They believe they have a global mission and want to empower global institutions against the sovereignty of people living in nation-states.
“They say that there are existential problems that require the overthrow of the nation-state model of governance. They have a list: infectious disease, pandemic threats, climate change, peacekeeping, cybercrime, financial stability, and the threat of instability, and I’m sure there are others on the list that we’ve yet to see. The idea is that these are necessarily worldwide and evade the capacity of the nation-state to deal with them.
“We are all being acculturated to believe that the nation-state is nothing but an anachronism that needs to be supplanted. Keep in mind that this necessarily means treating democracy and freedom as anachronisms too. In practice, the only means by which average people can restrain tyranny and despotism is through voting at the national level. None of us have any influence over the policies of the WHO, World Bank, or IMF, much less over the Gates or Soros Foundations. The way politics is structured in the world today, we are all necessarily disenfranchised in a world governed by global institutions.
“And that is precisely the point: to achieve universal disenfranchisement of average people so that the elites can have a free hand in regulating the planet as they see fit. This is why it becomes supremely urgent for every person who aspires to live in peace and freedom to regain national sovereignty and say no to the transfer of authority to institutions over which citizens have no control..
“There are plenty of reasons to regret the collapse of the neo-liberal consensus and a strong rationale to be concerned about the rise of protectionism and high tariffs. And yet what they called “free trade” (not the simple freedom to buy and sell across borders but rather a state-managed industrial plan) also came at a cost: the transference of sovereignty away from the people in their communities and nations to supranational institutions over which citizens have no control. It did not have to be this way but that is how it was constructed to be.
“For that reason, the neo-liberal consensus built in the postwar period contained the seeds of its own destruction. It was too dependent on the creation of institutions beyond people’s control and too reliant on elite mastery of events. It was already crumbling before the pandemic response but it was the Covid controls, nearly simultaneously imposed all over the world to underscore elite hegemony, that exposed the fist under the velvet glove..
“Many of us have long predicted a backlash to the lockdowns and all that was associated with them. The full scale of it none of us could have imagined. The drama of our times is as intense as any of history’s great epochs: the fall of Rome, the Great Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the fall of the multinational empires. The only question now is whether this ends like America 1776 or France 1790.”
Get your Free
financial review
It would now seem there was always a third option: a bloodless electoral landslide. Five years ago, in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, we wrote a piece called ‘A wrecking ball and a dearth of ideas’. In it we cited Robert Saunders of The New Statesman:
“When Theresa May, in 2017, promised “strong and stable leadership in the national interest”, she cannot have had this in mind. The long, agonised collapse of her premiership has left the Conservative Party in search of its sixth leader since the turn of the century and its third since 2016. The party has been crushed at the local elections and came fifth in the European Parliament elections, posting the lowest share of a national vote in its history. It has no legislative achievements since 2016, no discernible economic policy and no obvious vision for the future.”
Back then, we made the following observations:
“One of the strange beauties of the Brexit process is the wondrous nature of this wrecking ball as it takes on all comers in its game-changing attempts to demolish the British Establishment and subvert the wider status quo. Our relations with an overbearing and unaccountable EU ? Check. Quisling MPs ? Check. The BBC ? Check. Is there anything Brexit cannot endeavour to reset – the House of Lords; the influence of Big Business, big banks and crony capitalism; faith in the objectivity and even relevance of the mainstream media ?
“What the Brexit process has also revealed is the strange dearth of ideas at the heart of what were formerly our two main political parties. British Conservatism, suggests Robert Saunders,
“has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped “conserving”; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology. Historically, the Conservative Party has been a party of ideas, but not of ideology. Today, that relationship has been reversed: a party in thrall to ideology is reduced to boardroom banalities and half-remembered hymns to a Thatcherite past. Like an ageing Eighties tribute band, the party flubs wearily through the same tired playlist, barely noticing that the stadiums are empty, the hairstyles ludicrous and the fans long departed. In this sense, its Brexit woes are only the manifestation of a deeper problem: the closing of the Conservative mind.”
To paraphrase Amazon’s marketing call to action, those who liked Brexit’s wrecking ball will love Donald Trump’s. Whereas Trump Administration 1.0 was beset by the chaos of a confected pandemic, followed by a reflexive backlash by the Deep State, and then terminated by a Biden victory of dubious numerical provenance, Trump 2.0 promises more or less a clean sweep of the Augean Stables – a reversal of accumulated years of climate hustling, race hustling, gender hustling, and the complete repudiation of Marxist economic self-immolation, not least of green energy madness, masquerading as virtue-signalling political posturing. The sad remnants of the German economy (and government) serve as poster child for the baleful effects of Net Zero thinking on a political class incapable of mature thought.
The first obvious victim of Trump 2.0 – apart from the Democrat Party and its braying jackal puppet herself – was the legacy media, which spent the entire duration of the campaign busily digging its own grave of what now looks to be perpetual irrelevance. To say that the media landscape has shifted would be an understatement.
Big Tech (ex-Tesla and X, of course) and Big Pharma will presumably be amongst the next in the firing line. But both sectors may yet succumb to the forces of valuational gravity in the stock market before Supertrump gives them the duffing up they richly deserve.
But lest we get carried away on a cavalcade of Supertrump euphoria, it’s important to acknowledge that New Rome can’t be built overnight, and that seemingly insuperable problems – notably the US’ accumulated sovereign and federal debts – cannot be resolved simply by a stroke of the legislative pen. Trump Administration 2.0 can also expect concerted blowback from the Deep State, which will fight tooth and nail to resist incursions into its dark fiefdoms. (For these reasons we maintain our exposure to fiat currency and inflation hedges in the form of reasonably priced industrial and precious metals investments. We suspect that the foreseeable global – if not globalist – future will be one of competitive currency devaluations.)
Nevertheless, Trump 2.0 is clearly at least as much cause for celebration by libertarians, free speech advocates and free marketeers as Brexit was.
Annoying virtue signaller, fatuous globalist and once relevant musician Bono pledged to drive his car off a cliff if Donald Trump won the US 2024 Presidential election. That wrecking ball is most definitely back. With a vengeance.
………….
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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