Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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Helicopter Money and the End of Taxes

2020-10-01

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2020-10-01

Rather than right the ship, the "easy fix" is to distribute "free money"--not just to billionaires and corporations but to everyone.

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The Silent Exodus Nobody Sees: Leaving Work Forever

2020-09-24

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2020-09-24

Wages share income,1960-2020
The "take this job and shove it" exodus is silently gathering momentum. The exodus out of cities is getting a lot of attention, but the exodus that will unravel our economic and social orders is getting zero attention: the exodus from work. Like the exodus from troubled urban cores, the exodus from work has long-term, complex causes that the pandemic has accelerated.

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Inflation and “Socialism-Lite” Are Just What the Billionaires Want

2020-09-23

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2020-09-23

The Fruit of Financialization
After a bout of inflation and "socialism-light", we could end up with even more extreme inequality when the whole rotten structure collapses.

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“Inflation” and America’s Accelerating Class War

2020-09-21

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2020-09-21

Wealth inequality, 1910-2010
Those who don't see the fragmentation, the scarcities and the battlelines being drawn will be surprised by the acceleration of the unraveling. I recently came across the idea that inflation is a two-factor optimization problem.

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Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me

2020-09-16

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2020-09-16

Workers share of national income, 1994-2020
The banquet of consequences for the Fed, the elites and their armies of parasitic flunkies and factotums is being laid out, and there won't be much choice in the seating. Words can be debased just like currencies. Take the word sacrifice. 

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The Four D’s That Define the Future

2020-09-14

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2020-09-14

When the money runs out or loses its purchasing power, all sorts of complexity that were previously viewed as an essential crumble to dust. Four D's will define 2020-2025: derealization, denormalization, decomplexification and decoherence. That's a lot of D's. Let's take them one at a time.

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This Is How It Ends: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

2020-09-13

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2020-09-13

workers share of national income, 1994-2020
While the Federal Reserve and the Billionaire Class push the stock market to new highs to promote a false facade of prosperity, everyday life will fall apart. How will the status quo collapse? An open conflict--a civil war, an insurrection, a coup--appeals to our affection for drama, but the more likely reality is a decidedly undramatic dissolution in which all the elements of our way of life we reckoned were solid and permanent simply melt into...

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Intolerance and Authoritarianism Accelerate Disunity and Collapse

2020-09-12

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2020-09-12

Scapegoating dissenters only hastens the disunity and disarray that accelerates the final collapse. Authoritarianism is imposed on us, but its sibling intolerance is our own doing. Intolerance and authoritarianism are two sides of the same coin: as intolerance becomes the norm, the intolerant start demanding that the state enforce their intolerance by suppressing their enemies via increasingly heavy-handed authoritarian measures.

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Deflation of the Citizenry’s Hard Assets Will Be a Huge Buying Opportunity for Insider Power Elites

2020-09-02

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2020-09-02

The gravy train will have to stop at some point, but right now the global elites have pushed their chips on to the U.S. dollar and stocks. Editor's note: This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D., who has contributed essays to Of Two Minds since 2009.

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Nihilism Embodied: Our Lawless Financial System

2020-08-31

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2020-08-31

Not only have the billionaire class made money, they have tightened their monopolistic grip on the levers of money supply and distribution, turning a global rigged casino into a global company town.

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America’s Metastasizing Class Wars

2020-08-29

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2020-08-29

Soaring Income Inequality
Class wars are the inevitable result of an economic system in which 'anything goes if you're rich enough and winners take most'. The traditional class war has been waged between wage-earners (who sell their labor) and their employers (owners of capital and the means of production).

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Will Skilled Hands-On Labor Finally Become More Valuable?

2020-08-23

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2020-08-23

The sands beneath what's scarce and what's over-abundant are shifting. On a recent visit to the welding shop where my niece's husband works, I asked him if they had enough welders for their workload.

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Our Systemic Drift to Collapse

2020-08-21

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2020-08-21

How systems collapse
Thus do the lazy complacent passengers drift inexorably toward the cataracts of collapse just ahead. The boat ride down to the waterfall of systemic collapse is not dramatic, it's lazy drifting: a lazy complacency that doing more of what worked in the past will work again, and an equally lazy disregard for how far the system has drifted from the point when things actually worked.

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The Empire Will Strike Back: Dollar Supremacy Is the Fed’s Imperial Mandate

2020-08-19

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2020-08-19

Triffin's Paradox demands painful trade-offs to issue a reserve currency, and it demands the issuing central bank serve two competing audiences and markets. Judging by the headlines and pundit chatter, the U.S. dollar is about to slide directly to zero. This sense of certitude is interesting, given that no empire prospered by devaluing its currency. 

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Here’s Why the “Impossible” Economic Collapse Is Unavoidable

2020-08-18

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2020-08-18

The Rising Wedge Model of Breakdown
This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy. A collapse of major chunks of the economy is widely viewed as "impossible" because the federal government can borrow and spend unlimited amounts of money because the Federal Reserve can create unlimited amounts of money: the government borrows $1 trillion by selling $1 trillion in Treasury bonds, the Fed prints $1 trillion...

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It’s Do-or-Die, Deep State: Either Strangle the Stock Market Rally Now or Cede the Election to Trump

2020-08-17

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2020-08-17

With only 56 trading days and fewer than 80 calendar days to the election, the Deep State camps seeking to torpedo Trump's re-election have reached the do-or-die point. Back in June I speculated that the only way the Deep State could deep-six Trump's re-election was to sink the stock market rally, which the president has long touted as evidence of his economic leadership.

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The Economy Is Mortally Wounded

2020-08-10

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2020-08-10

A fully financialized, totally debt and speculation-dependent economy is terminal once leverage and debt stop expanding exponentially. We all know the movie scene in which the character is wounded but dismisses it as no big deal, and then lurches into the closing sequence where we discover the wound was not inconsequential, it was mortal, and the character expires.

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If the “Market” Never Goes Down, The System Is Doomed

2020-08-09

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2020-08-09

Bear Market Cartoon
"Markets" that never go down aren't markets, they're signaling mechanisms of the Powers That Be. Markets are fundamentally clearing houses of information on price, demand, sentiment, expectations and so on--factual data on supply and demand, shipping costs, cost of credit, etc.--and reflections of trader and consumer emotions and psychology.

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The Bogus “Recovery,” Stress and Burnout

2020-08-07

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2020-08-07

US Stress, 2012 - 2017
We have three basic ways to counter the destructive consequences of stress.We have all experienced the disorientation and "brain freeze" that stress triggers. The pandemic and the responses to the pandemic have been continuous sources of stress, i.e. chronic stress, which is the pathway to burnout, the collapse of our ability to cope with the burdens pressing on us.

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A Vaccine May Not Be the “Magical Cure” Everyone Anticipates

2020-08-03

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2020-08-03

Few appear willing to follow the probabilities of a future in which a vaccine cannot possibly be the "magic cure" everyone wants. Let's attempt the impossible and set aside all preconceptions we might have about a vaccine for Covid-19, and think it through somewhat dispassionately.

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