Tim Price on Trump's use of executive orders

Another dark cloud hanging over the political landscape is the, for want of a better phrase, imperial nature of the entire executive order process.  To an admitted outsider, rule by executive order fiat seems to run a coach and horses through the idea of a constitutional framework for democratic government, and the concept of checks and balances against Presidential overreach.  It also seems to refashion the Presidential role to something akin to a ‘primus inter pares’ amongst a cadre of philosophically and morally unreliable tech bro robber barons. 

But let’s not allow the best to become the enemy of the good.  Given what’s at stake, we’ll take robber barons over doctrinaire Communists every day of the week.

~ Tim Price, "War of the Worlds," Price Value Partners, February 3, 2025

Tim Price on central banking

Criticising our central banks only gets you so far, in the same way that repeatedly banging your head against the wall only gets you so far.  The mainstream financial media and our politicians aren’t listening. In many cases – the FT and The Economist one step forward, please – they have cheered on the central banks to the very echo.  [Bloomberg columnist] Merryn Somerset Webb recently observed that at an FT event at which she spoke, she was followed by the paper’s chief economics correspondent, Martin Wolf, who recommended banning cash altogether.  We are surrounded by madmen.

~ Tim Price, "Flying Blind," Price Value Partners, December 4, 2023

Tim Price on central banking

Central bank monetary planning is the glaring hole at the centre of modern economics.  We accept (or should do) that the modern economic world is highly complex, with practically infinite interactions between countries, governments, exchange rates, interest rates, stock markets, corporations, households, entrepreneurs, and consumers.  In most areas we also accept that free markets are perfectly capable of driving Adam Smith’s invisible hand to ensure that enlightened self-interest benefits the many as opposed to the few.  Despite this, the idea that one institution – the central bank- is even capable of mastering such complexity and fine-tuning the workings of a highly complex economy through the brute mechanism of dictating the price of money has rarely been brought into question.

~ Tim Price, "Regime Change is Coming," Price Value Partners, April 3, 2023

Tim Price on judging character and minimizing the risk of fraud

If people are determined to commit fraud, there is probably not much any of us can realistically do to stop them.  We do recall what won us over to investing in Vietnam, however, some years ago – apart from the extraordinarily attractive valuations and growth prospects of this admittedly frontier market.  We met with the chairman and chief executive officer of the country’s largest securities broker.  We confessed that we had some questions about the standards of corporate governance in the country.  She responded that they had indeed experienced a fraud perpetrated by the bank manager of a local bank.  As a result he had been executed. 

There are, however, certain steps one can take at least to minimise the risk of control fraud and the related risk of catastrophic capital loss.  One is obviously to develop an acute judgment of other people’s character.  One is not to invest in banks.  One is to allow oneself to be naturally drawn to superior allocators of capital, running shareholder-friendly businesses in which they already have a meaningful equity stake.  And one is to diversify anyway, because you simply never know.

~ Tim Price, "There Is Nothing New Under the Sun," Price Value Partners, November 21, 2022

Tim Price on mask wearning and freedom

If you're still wearing a mask, you almost deserve everything you are shortly going to get by way of permanent loss of freedoms.

~ Tim Price, tweet, March 30, 2021

Tim Price on parallels to the French Revolution

Some suggest that the most appropriate analogue for the current global crisis – the spread of a pandemic that has resulted in some catastrophic mis-steps by multiple governments – is the Great Depression of the 1930s...  But perhaps an altogether darker and more substantial comparative reset is that of the French Revolution itself. 

Some historians, perhaps most notably those of a Marxist bent, regard the French Revolution as the most significant event in the history of the modern world. The Revolution replaced a monarchy with a republic, reshaped the social order and the role of the aristocracy and the Church, ushered in a period of extraordinary outbursts of violence, and ultimately led to a dictatorship under Napoleon – who would then export many of its principles, by force, to much of western Europe. 

Like so many revolutions, this one was in large part triggered by finance.

~ Tim Price, "Children of the Revolution," Price Value Partners, March 22, 2021

Tim Price on investing and trust

We don’t trust politicians.  We don’t trust overvalued ‘meme’ stocks.  We value committed free market capitalist entrepreneurs, we trust in price discovery as far as central banks will allow it, and we trust gold.

~ Tim Price, "A Question of Trust," Price Value Partners, February 15, 2021