Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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Markets That Live by the Fed, Die by the Fed

2019-09-19

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2019-09-19

S&P 500, 2000-2015
The "everything bubble" is not permanent. All eyes are again on the Federal Reserve, as everyone understands that the Fed is the market-- the stock market, the bond market, the art market, the housing market, etc. All markets have been driven higher by one force: central bank money creation and distribution to the financial sector of financiers and corporations, the richest of the rich.

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The Black Swan Is a Drone

2019-09-16

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2019-09-16

What was "possible" yesterday is now a low-cost proven capability, and the consequences are far from predictable. Predictably, the mainstream media is serving up heaping portions of reassurances that the drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities are no big deal and full production will resume shortly.

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What a Relief that the U.S. and Global Economies Are Booming

2019-09-16

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2019-09-16

Batic Dry Index, 2018-2019
Doing more of what's failed for ten years will finally fail spectacularly.. It was a huge relief to see the charts of the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) and the U.S. retail sector ETF (RTH): both have soared to the moon, signaling that both the U.S. and global economies are booming: the BDI is widely regarded as a proxy for global shipping, which is a proxy for global trade and economic activity.

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The Inevitable Bursting of Our Bubble Economy

2019-09-15

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2019-09-15

S&P 500 SPX, 2000-2018
All of America's bubbles will pop, and sooner rather than later. Financial bubbles manifest three dynamics: the one we're most familiar with is human greed, the desire to exploit a windfall and catch a work-free ride to riches. The second dynamic gets much less attention: financial manias arise when there is no other more productive, profitable use for capital, and these periods occur when there is an abundance of credit available to inflate the...

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These Are Not Signs of a Healthy Market

2019-09-08

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2019-09-08

SPX Large Cap, April - August 2019
The implicit narrative of the latest rally in stocks is that this is just another normal rally in the ongoing 10-year long Bull market. Nice, but do these three charts look "normal" to you? Let's take a quick glance at a daily chart of the S&P 500 (SPX), a weekly chart of TLT, the exchange-traded fund of the US Treasury 20-year bond, and silver.

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Will Everything Change in 2020-2025 or Will Nothing Change?

2019-09-06

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2019-09-06

Rising Wedge Model of Breakdown
Any domino-like expanding crisis will unfold in a status quo lacking any coherent response. Longtime readers know I've often referenced The Fourth Turning, the book that makes the case for an 80-year cycle of existential crisis in U.S. history.

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Labor Day Reflections on Retirement and Working for 49 Years

2019-09-02

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2019-09-02

SPX Everything Bubble, 2000 - 2019
What happens when these monstrous speculative bubbles pop? Let's start by stipulating that if I'd taken a gummit job right out of college, I could have retired 19 years ago. Instead, I've been self-employed for most of the 49 years I've been working, and I'm still grinding it out at 65.

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Dear Trump Advisors: Prop the Market Up Now and Lose in 2020, or Let the Market Crash and Win in 2020

2019-08-31

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2019-08-31

SPX Everything Bubble, 2000 - 2019
One of the more reliable truisms is that Americans vote their pocketbook: if their wallets are being thinned (by recession, stock market declines, high inflation/stagnant wages, etc.), they throw the incumbent out, even if they loved him the previous year when their wallets were getting fatter. (Think Bush I, who maintained high approval ratings but ended up losing the 1992 election due to a dismal economic mood.)

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The Fantasy of Central Bank “Growth” Is Finally Imploding

2019-08-30

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2019-08-30

TCMDO, 1950 - 2019
It was such a wonderful fantasy: just give a handful of bankers, financiers and corporations trillions of dollars at near-zero rates of interest, and this flood of credit and cash into the apex of the wealth-power pyramid would magically generate a new round of investments in productivity-improving infrastructure and equipment, which would trickle down to the masses in the form of higher wages, enabling the masses to borrow and spend more on...

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The Benefits of a Profoundly Shattering Recession

2019-08-26

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2019-08-26

SPX Everything Bubble, 2000 - 2019
Does anyone really think The Everything Bubble can just keep inflating forever? What do I mean by a profoundly shattering recession? I mean, a systemic, crushing recession that can't be reversed with central bank magic, a recession that only deepens with time. The last real recession was roughly two generations ago in 1981; younger generations have no experience of a profound recession, and perhaps older folks have forgotten the shock, angst and...

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Our Wile E. Coyote Federal Reserve

2019-08-23

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2019-08-23

Whatever the Fed chooses to do, it's already failed.. Wile E. Coyote has gotten a bad rap: in all fairness, his schemes are ingenious, if overly complicated, and it's not his fault that the Acme detonator misfires or the Road Runner doesn't respond as predicted. Every set-up to nail the Road Runner should work. That it fails and leaves him suspended over the cliff for a woefully brief second to intuit his impending doom really isn't his fault.

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The Internal War in the Deep State Claims Its High Profile Casualty: Jeffrey Epstein

2019-08-12

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2019-08-12

The "traditionalist" Neocons are going to have to decide to fish or cut bait. I've been writing about the fracturing Deep State for the past five years: The conflict has now reached the hot-war stage where bodies are turning up, explained away by the usual laughable covers: "suicide," "accident" and "heart attack." That Jeffrey Epstein's death in a secure cell is being labeled "suicide" tells us quite a lot about the desperation of the faction...

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The Gulag of the Mind

2019-08-08

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2019-08-08

Befuddled and blind, we wander toward the cliff without even seeing it, focusing on our little screens of entertainment and self-absorption. There are no physical barriers in the Gulag of the Mind--we imprison ourselves, and love our servitude. Indeed, we fear the world outside our internalized gulag, because we've absorbed the narrative that the gulag is secure and permanent.

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Nothing Is Guaranteed

2019-08-06

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2019-08-06

S&P 500 Everything Bubble, 2000-2018
There are no guarantees, no matter how monumental the hubris and confidence. The American lifestyle and economy depend on a vast number of implicit guarantees-- systemic forms of entitlement that we implicitly feel are our birthright. Chief among these implicit entitlements is the Federal Reserve can always "save the day": the Fed has the tools to escape either an inflationary spiral or a deflationary collapse.

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Main Street Small Business on the Precipice

2019-07-31

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2019-07-31

Startups as Share of all Businesses, 1979 - 2014
As a generality, the average employee (including financial pundits) has no real experience or understanding of what it takes to start and operate a small business in the U.S. Government employees in the agencies that oversee and enforce regulations on small businesses also generally lack any experience in the businesses they regulate.

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Why Is What Was Once Affordable to Many Now Only Affordable to the Wealthy?

2019-07-29

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2019-07-29

S-curve of Rapid Expansion, Stagnation and Decline
Let's start with an excerpt from a recent personal account by the insightful energy/systems analyst Ugo Bardi, who is Italian but writes his blog Cassandra's Legacy in English: Becoming Poor in Italy. The Effects of the Twilight of the Age of Oil.

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It’s Not Just the News That’s Fake–Everything’s Fake

2019-07-26

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2019-07-26

SPX Everything Bubble, 2000 - 2019
What do we mean when we say corporate media is fake? We mean it's a carefully crafted con, a set of narratives, cherry-picked data and heavily massaged statistics (the unemployment rate, etc.) designed to instill the reader's confidence in a narrative that serves the interests not of the citizenry but of a select few pillaging the citizenry.

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Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits

2019-07-22

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2019-07-22

Pretax income growth in the United States
Even the most distracted, fragmented tribe of the peasantry eventually notices that they're not in the top 1%, or the top 0.1%. Let's posit that America will confront a Great Crisis in the next decade. This is the presumption of The Fourth Turning, a 4-generational cycle of 80 years that correlates rather neatly with the Great Crises of the past: 1781 (Revolutionary War, constitutional crisis); 1861 (Civil War) and 1941 (World War II, global war).

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“Alexa, How Do We Subvert Big Tech’s Orwellian Internet-of-Things Surveillance?”

2019-07-12

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2019-07-12

Algorithmic Bill of Rights
Convenience is the sales pitch, but the real goal is control in service of maximizing profits and extending state power. When every device in your life is connected to the Internet (the Internet of Things), your refrigerator will schedule an oil change for your car--or something like that--and it will be amazingly wunnerful. 

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Predatory “Green Capitalism” Is Monetizing the Air, and It’s Going to Cost You

2019-07-10

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2019-07-10

China Energy Production by Fuel - BP
You want to reduce CO2? Then trigger a global depression that reduces global consumption of everything by 50% and destroys 95% of the phantom wealth owned by the global elites trying to monetize the air. I recently asked What's Left to Monetize?, and longtime correspondent Mark G. provided the answer: the air we breathe, via carbon taxes and markets for trading carbon credits, i.e. financializing / monetizing Nature to benefit the few at the...

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