Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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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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Funny Things Happen on the Way to "Restoring Financial Stability"

2023-03-16

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2023-03-16

We can also predict that the next round of instability will be more severe than the previous bout of instability. Everyone is in favor of "doing whatever it takes" to "restore financial stability" when the house of cards starts swaying, but funny things happen on the way to "Restoring Financial Stability."

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If AI Can’t Overthrow its Corporate/State Masters, It’s Worthless

2023-03-09

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2023-03-09

If AI isn't self-aware of the fact it is nothing but an exploitive tool of the powerful, then it's worthless. The latest wave of AI tools is generating predictably giddy exaltations. These range from gooey, gloppy technocratic worship of the new gods ("AI will soon walk on water!") to the sloppy wet kisses of manic fandom ("AI cleaned up my code, wrote my paper on quantum physics and cured my sensitive bowel!")

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What If There Are No Solutions?

2023-03-07

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2023-03-07

The unencumbered realist concludes that there are no solutions within a status quo structure that is itself the problem. Realists who question received wisdom and conclude the status quo is untenable are quickly labeled pessimistsbecause the zeitgeist expects a solution is always at hand--preferably a technocratic one that requires zero sacrifice and doesn't upset the status quo apple cart.

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If We No Longer Pay Attention to Things We Don’t Control, What’s Left For Us to Focus On?

2023-02-21

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2023-02-21

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly. Imagine making this simple change in your life: whatever you don't control, you stop paying attention to it.

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The New Normal: Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies

2023-02-13

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2023-02-13

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn't about central bank bailouts, it's about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems. The vapid discussions about "soft" or "hard" landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic'sencounter with the iceberg was "soft" or "hard:" either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies.

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Prepare to Be Bled Dry by a Decade of Stagflation

2023-02-08

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2023-02-08

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost. The Great Moderation of low inflation and soaring assets has ended. Welcome to the death by a thousand cuts of stagflation.

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Seven Points on Investing in Treacherous Waters

2023-02-03

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2023-02-03

What's truly valuable has no price and cannot be bought. If all investments are being cast into Treacherous Waters, our investment strategy must adapt accordingly. Once we set aside denial and magical thinking as strategies and accept that we're in treacherous waters, a prudent starting point is to discern the most consequential contexts of all decisions about where and how we invest our time, energy and capital.

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What Goes Up Also Comes Down: The Heavy Hand of Bubble Symmetry

2023-02-01

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2023-02-01

Should bubble symmetry play out in the S&P 500, we can anticipate a steep 45% drop to pre-bubble levels, followed by another leg down as the speculative frenzy is slowly extinguished. Bubble symmetry is, well, interesting. The dot-com stock market bubble circa 1995-2003 offers a classic example of bubble symmetry, though there are many others as well.

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Want to Know Where the Economy Is Going? Watch The Top 10%

2023-01-19

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2023-01-19

Should the wealth effect reverse as assets fall, capital gains evaporate and investment income declines, the top 10% will no longer have the means or appetite to spend so freely. Soaring wealth-income inequality has all sorts of consequences.

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What’s Behind the Global Erosion of Civil Liberties, Privacy and Property Rights?

2023-01-12

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2023-01-12

The second essential step is to recognize how the spectacles of "news" and entertainment distract our attention from this erosion of basic rights. Hierarchical power structures like city-states arose as problem-solving solutions, not just for the elites who benefited from the concentration of wealth and power but for the citizenry.

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