Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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How Do We Fix the Collapse of Quality?

2024-11-20

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2024-11-20

Every product now has an "extended warranty" admission of the collapse of quality and durability. There's a great uplifting hope swirling around the potential to fix what's broken, and so here's my question: how do we fix the collapse of quality and durability that we now take for granted?

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Is Social Media Actually "Media," Or Is It Something Else?

2024-10-30

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2024-10-30

By placing search/social media in the bucket of newspapers, radio and TV networks, perhaps we've obscured their true nature as "Digital Marketing Mechanisms."

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Welcome to the Circular Firing Squad

2024-10-29

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2024-10-29

If you find my scribblings upsetting, there's an easy solution: stop reading it. We'll both benefit. I'm never more than one inch away from converting my site from essays to photos of kittens and puppies as the only means to gain respite from being hammered for my many failings as a human being.

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Can We Rein In the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy?

2024-10-14

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2024-10-14

Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the dust settles.

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Why Political "Solutions" Don’t Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse

2024-10-02

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2024-10-02

The system has reached the limits of its adaptability. Everything else is entertainment. A great many people have immense faith in political solutions to looming crises: if only we elect new leaders, if only we replace current policies with new policies, everything would be fixed and the crises will all dissipate.

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How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class Now?

2024-09-27

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2024-09-27

If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it straightforward for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" to climb the ladder to middle class security.

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So the Economy Now Depends on Stocks Which Depend on Front-Running the Fed–And This Is Fine?

2024-09-23

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2024-09-23

Is an economy based on the wealth effect generated by front-running the front-runners really that stable?

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What If All the Conventional Models Fail to Predict What Happens Next?

2024-09-03

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2024-09-03

The 'novel, apocalyptic situation which has now arisen' goes largely unrecognized. A truly staggering quantity of content is aimed at predicting what happens next, a.k.a. the future, and justifies their prediction by referencing models that are presented as rock-solid predictive tools.

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"Why Are You So Negative?" Good Question. Here’s the Answer: Real Life

2024-06-25

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2024-06-25

I think it's more productive to go with Plan B: set aside our emotions and reluctance and start doing the hard work of dealing with polycrisis.

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If AI Is So Great, Prove It: Eliminate All Surveillance, Spam and Robocalling

2024-06-07

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2024-06-07

AI is for the peons, access to humans is reserved for the wealthy. Judging by the near-infinite hype spewed about AI, its power is practically limitless: it's going to do all our work better and cheaper than we can do, replacing us at work, to name one example making the rounds.

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Financial Forecast 2025-2032: Please Don’t Be Naive

2024-04-15

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2024-04-15

Rather than attempt to evade Caesar's reach, a better strategy might be to 'go gray': blend in, appear average. Let's start by stipulating that I don't "like" this forecast. I'm not "talking my book" (for example, promoting nuclear power because I own shares in a uranium mine) or issuing this forecast because I favor it.

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Sound Money Vs. Fiat Currency: Trade and Credit Are the Wild Cards

2024-04-11

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2024-04-11

We need to start thinking outside the current system, which has no solutions.

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Global Recession’s Winners and Losers

2024-03-06

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2024-03-06

The few winners of global recession will use the decline as a means to break the chokehold of unproductive BAU elites.

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Rates, Risk and Debt: The Unavoidable Reckoning Ahead

2024-02-26

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2024-02-26

Policy errors have consequences, and we're only in the first inning of those consequences.

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How the Economy Changed: There’s No Bargains Left Anywhere

2024-02-23

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2024-02-23

What changed in the economy is now nobody can afford to get by on working-class wages because there's no longer any bargains.

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Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work

2024-02-14

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2024-02-14

One wonders what we're paying for via taxes, products and services, when we end up having to do so much of the work ourselves for nothing.

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Irony Alert: "Outlawing" Recession Has Made a Monster Recession Inevitable

2024-02-07

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2024-02-07

Those who came of age after 1982 have never experienced a real recession, and so they're unprepared for anything other than guarantees of rescue and permanent expansion.

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What the Fed Accomplished: Distorted the Economy, Enriched the Rich and Crushed the Middle Class

2024-01-04

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2024-01-04

The mainstream holds the Fed is busy planning a return to the glory days of zero interest rates, but ZIRP is on the downside of the S-Curve; it's done, gone, history.

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The Invisible Court’s Verdict: You Are Hereby Exiled to Digital Siberia

2023-11-09

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2023-11-09

As in the Gulag it replicates, the innocent are swept up with the guilty in a disconcertingly unjust ratio.

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The Everything Bubble and Global Bankruptcy

2023-03-27

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2023-03-27

The resulting erosion of collateral will collapse the global credit bubble, a repricing/reset that will bankrupt the global economy and financial system. Scrape away the complexity and every economic crisis and crash boils down to the precarious asymmetry between collateral and the debt secured by that collateral collapsing.

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