Tony Deden on the investment business

There's a difference between an investment practice and an investment business.  In a business, you seek to do what the customer wants.  A practice is that you do the right thing by the customer regardless of what he wants or what he thinks he needs.  You seek to do the right thing.  And that's very difficult, actually.  It's not very popular.

~ Tony Deden, "Tony Deden - Master Value Investor," State of the Markets, 40:50 mark, January 10, 2025

Tony Deden on investing

I'm not so sure that the business of deploying your capital is something that anybody could do just because they want to or because they're intelligent and smart and they have a medical degree or whatever it is they do.  I think it's a matter of common sense and temperament more than it is one of knowledge and intellect.

~ Tony Deden, "Tony Deden - Master Value Investor," State of the Markets, 1:14:50 mark, January 10, 2025

Tony Deden on high time preference in the Western world

We're no longer a culture of production.  We're a culture of consumption and thinking about today.  We've eaten the seed for tomorrow, completely.  Look, there have been difficult times in the past, many many and even worse, but we've never had this universal, more or less global - well, I should exclude parts of Asia, I suppose and parts of the world - but at least in the Western world, we've never had such a disintegration in every respect as we face today.  I'm not sure what impact that has long-term on many of the things we take for granted.

~ Tony Deden, "Tony Deden - Master Value Investor," State of the Markets, 40:50 mark, January 10, 2025

Connor O'Keeffe on why many victims of LA wildfires were uninsured

Making matters worse, many of the homes destroyed last week were uninsured.  Progressives and establishment media outlets seized on this fact to blame climate change for driving insurance providers out of high-risk areas. 

This talking point is complete nonsense.  If the risk of natural disasters in an area people want to live in increases, that’s good for insurance companies.  It drives up the demand for their product.  It’s true that home insurance providers have been fleeing the areas affected by these fires—with one provider canceling thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades in the last year alone.  But that’s not because of climate change, it’s because of government intervention.

[...]

When governments mess with insurance prices—either through subsidies, cheap public insurance, or price controls—the result is always the same. More people move to dangerous areas that are highly susceptible to natural disasters. 

In 1988, California passed a law that forced insurance prices down by 20 percent, banned providers from using forecasts of future risk to set prices, and subjected all future price increases to government oversight. With rates severely decoupled from risk, the state saw extensive development in some very fire-prone areas. Then, after an exceptionally bad fire year in 2017, insurance providers tried to get approval to raise premiums to account for the high level of risk across the state. The government said no. 

As a result, seven of the twelve largest home insurance providers pulled out of California. And that trend is continuing today. 

~ Connor O'Keeffe, "Climate Change Is Not the Cause of California’s 'Insurance Crisis'," Mises Wire, January 14, 2025

Kevin O’Leary supports tariffs on China

China's a different issue completely to Canada or any other country.  Since they came into the World Trade Organization, they have broken the rules with every country, including the U.S. 

I'm an individual who does business there.  My businesses have been absolutely screwed.  I've said it countless times.  They don't play by the rules.  There's nothing reciprocal in our relations. 

The only way to put [Xi] at risk is to say, look, if you want to mess with the largest economy you trade with, then we're going to force a lot of people that make yoga mats or electronics or whatever else it is to be unemployed in your cities, and they'll be rioting in the streets, they won't have any bread, and you will be out of power.  That is the only way it's going to work — so very selected high-impact weaponry like tariffs, but you've got to be hardcore. 

[Xi] only understands the stick.  That's all he understands.  Any weakness at all, he plays off and he has done so for years.  So I'm hoping this is the administration that fixes the problem.  I have really been hurt by China, and there are millions of other businesses in America in the same boat I'm in. 

~ Kevin O’Leary, interview with Fox Business, "'You've got to be hardcore': Kevin O’Leary warns Trump tariffs on China could trigger ‘riots in the streets’ — says this ‘high impact weaponry’ is only solution. How to bet on the US in 2025," msn.com, January 11, 2025

Mark Zandi on the U.S. economy

President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.  The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly postpandemic than prepandemic.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, "Is Donald Trump inheriting the best economy in history?," MarketWatch, January 11, 2025

James Bovard on liberty in America

If you look at the rhetoric of the presidential campaign this year, you had Biden promising to make America more woke, you had Trump promising to make America great again.  What you didn't have is anybody promising to make America constitutional again or to make America free again.

So I really wonder how much love of liberty Americans still have, because it doesn't come up that often as a pure issue in presidential campaigns.  It really hasn't been a primary issue, I don't think, by a major candidate since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan.

~ James Bovard, "Draining the Swamp with Jim Bovard," Competitive Enterprise Institute, 23:30 mark, January 9, 2025