My philosopher friend, marcel.a.emmenegger@gmail.com recently made some interesting comments about The Paradox of Corporate Morality in an essay entitled "Optics as Ethics."
He writes:
Modern capitalism operates with a peculiar moral compass. Systemic harm is absorbed and normalized. Personal scandal is punished swiftly and without mercy.
Nestlé illustrates this paradox in its starkest form. The baby formula scandal in Africa. The privatization of water in drought-stricken regions. The persistence of child labor in cocoa supply chains. Price fixing, environmental destruction, the quiet devastation of communities from Pakistan to South America.
These are not allegations. They are public record. Each time, Nestlé “regrets,” announces reform, and moves on. The brand endures. The profits grow. The harm disperses into subsidiaries, suppliers, and “market forces.” No single executive is ever held to account.
And yet: when a CEO engages in a consensual relationship with an employee, he is removed - swiftly, publicly, definitively.
The technical deterioration of the US market, which has been going on for a few months would not be so worrisome if it was occurring under “reasonable” conditions, but this is not the case. The deterioration is occurring under extremely high valuations as I already showed last month.
Our “encouraging” friend Simon Hunt who always find interesting angles to our “Troubled World” recently quoted Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, 25th September 2025: “Another clear example is the Western-provoked crisis in Ukraine, through which NATO and the European Union want to declare - have already declared – an actual war on my country and are directly participating in it.”
MF: Another concern I would have, aside from record valuations (the Buffett Indicator’ stock valuation exceeds 200%), is the following. Overseas investors’ allocation to US equities hit a record 61%. This share is now 7% percentage points above the 2000 Dot-Com bubble peak. By comparison, at the Great Financial Crisis low, it was just 25%.
My preferred asset remains precious metals although the recent collapse in the value of paper money against precious metals could be a harbinger of “bad” things to come.
I remain remindful of the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who opined that “Genius is knowing where to stop”.
With kind regards
Yours sincerely
Marc Faber
Ready to get started?
