Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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Here’s What We’ve Lost in the Past Decade

2018-07-31

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2018-07-31

The ever-widening wage gap 1973-2015
The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts. The past decade of "recovery" and "growth" has actually been a decade of catastrophic losses for our society and nation. Here's a short list of what we've lost: 1. Functioning markets. Free markets discover price and assess risk.

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Here’s How Systems (and Nations) Fail

2018-07-29

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2018-07-29

Rising Insulin prices 2001-2015
These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful. Would any sane person choose America's broken healthcare system over a cheaper, more effective alternative?

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When Long-Brewing Instability Finally Reaches Crisis

2018-07-28

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2018-07-28

Systems Collapse
The doom-and-gloomers among us who have been predicting the unraveling of an inherently unstable financial system appear to have been disproved by the reflation of yet another credit-asset bubble. But inherently unstable / imbalanced systems can stumble onward for years or even decades, making fools of all who warn of an eventual reset.

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The Imperial Naivete of the American Public

2018-07-24

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2018-07-24

Dominance of Google and Facebook
The nation's premier corporate profit engines / social media giants are the ideal platforms for undermining the U.S. via the sowing of disintegration. Whether it's stated or not, one source of the inchoate outrage triggered by Russian-sourced purchases of adverts on Facebook in 2016 (i.e. "meddling in our election") is the sense that the U.S. is sacrosanct due to our innate moral goodness and our Imperial Project.

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Solutions without Historical Templates: Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains

2018-07-22

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2018-07-22

S curve centralization
Crypto-blockchain technologies are leveraging the potential of computers and the web for direct political-social innovation. We're accustomed to three basic templates for system-wide solutions or improvements: 1. an individual "builds a better mousetrap" and starts a company to exploit this competitive advantage;

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Our Institutions Are Failing

2018-07-16

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2018-07-16

Lifecycle bureaucracy
Our institutional failure reminds me of the phantom legions of Rome's final days. The mainstream media and its well-paid army of "authorities" / pundits would have us believe the decline in our collective trust in our institutions is the result of fake news, i.e. false narratives and data presented as factual.

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Will AI “Change the World” Or Simply Boost Profits?

2018-07-12

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2018-07-12

National Income: Corporate Profits Before Tax 1950-2018
The real battle isn't between a cartoonish vision or a dystopian nightmare--it's between decentralized ownership and control of these technologies and centralized ownership and control. The hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and its cousins Big Data and Machine Learning is ubiquitous, and largely unexamined. AI is going to change the world by freeing humankind from most of its labors, etc. etc. etc.

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We Are All Hostages of Corporate Profits

2018-07-10

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2018-07-10

Corporate Profits Before Tax 1950-2018
We're in the endgame of financialization and globalization, and it won't be pretty for all the hostages of corporate profits. Though you won't read about it in the mainstream corporate media, the nation is now hostage to outsized corporate profits. The economy and society at large are now totally dependent on soaring corporate profits and the speculative bubbles they fuel, and this renders us all hostages: Make a move to limit corporate profits or...

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The USA Is Now a 3rd World Nation

2018-07-09

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2018-07-09

Try arguing against the facts displayed in this chart:
I know it hurts, but the reality is painfully obvious: the USA is now a 3rd World nation. Dividing the Earth's nations into 1st, 2nd and 3rd world has fallen out of favor;apparently it offended sensibilities. It has been replaced by the politically correct developed and developing nations, a terminology which suggests all developing nations are on the pathway to developed-nation status.

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The Gathering Storm

2018-07-06

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2018-07-06

S-Curve Expansion, Stagnation and Decline
July 4th is an appropriate day to borrow Winston Churchill's the gathering storm to describe the existential crisis that will envelope America within the next decade. There is no single cause of the gathering storm; in complex systems, dynamics feed back into one another, and the sum of destabilizing disorder is greater than a simple sum of its parts.

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Make Capital Cheap and Labor Costly, and Guess What Happens?

2018-06-28

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2018-06-28

Price Changes, 1996 - 2016
Employment expands in the Protected cartel-dominated sectors, and declines in every sector exposed to globalization, domestic competition and cheap capital. If you want to understand why the global economy is failing the many while enriching the few, start with the basics: capital, labor and resources. What happens when central banks drop interest rates to near-zero? Capital becomes dirt-cheap.

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Dear High School Graduates: the Status Quo “Solutions” Enrich the Few at Your Expense

2018-06-27

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2018-06-27

Student Loans Debt 2008-2018
You deserve a realistic account of the economy you're joining. Dear high school graduates: please glance at these charts before buying into the conventional life-course being promoted by the status quo. Here's the summary: the status quo is pressuring you to accept its "solutions": borrow mega-bucks to attend college, then buy a decaying bungalow or hastily constructed stucco box for $800,000 in a "desirable" city, pay sky-high income and property...

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Gresham’s Law and Bitcoin

2018-06-23

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2018-06-23

Bolivar/U.S. Dollar, 2010-2018
Rather suddenly, the state issued fiat currency bolivar lost 99% of its purchasing power. Gresham's law holds that "bad money drives out good money," meaning that given a choice of currencies (broadly speaking, "money" that serves as a store of value and a means of exchange), people use depreciating "bad" to buy goods and services and hoard "good" money that is appreciating or holding its value.

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Here We Go Again: Our Double-Bubble Economy

2018-06-17

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2018-06-17

S&P/Case-Shiller 2000-2018
The bubbles in assets are supported by the invisible bubble in greed, euphoria and credulity. Well, folks, here we go again: we have a double-bubble economy in housing and stocks, and a third difficult-to-chart bubble in greed, euphoria and credulity.

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The Three Crises That Will Synchronize a Global Meltdown by 2025

2018-06-09

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2018-06-09

Systems Collapse
We're going to get a synchronized global dynamic, but it won't be "growth" and stability, it will be DeGrowth and instability. To understand the synchronized global meltdown that is on tap for the 2021-2025 period, we must first stipulate the relationship of "money" to energy:"money" is nothing more than a claim on future energy. If there's no energy available to fuel the global economy, "money" will have little value.

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Does Anyone Else See a Giant Bear Flag in the S&P 500?

2018-06-07

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2018-06-07

S&P 500 Large Cap Index 2018
We all know the game is rigged, but strange things occasionally upset the "easy money bet." "Reality" is in the eye of the beholder, especially when it comes to technical analysis and economic tea leaves.

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Burrito Index Update: Burrito Cost Triples, Official Inflation Up 43 percent from 2001

2018-06-02

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2018-06-02

US Healthcare 1960 - 2010
Welcome to debt-serfdom, the only possible output of the soaring cost of living. Long-time readers may recall the Burrito Index, my real-world measure of inflation. The Burrito Index: Consumer Prices Have Soared 160% Since 2001 (August 1, 2016). The Burrito Index tracks the cost of a regular burrito since 2001. Since we keep detailed records of expenses (a necessity if you’re a self-employed free-lance writer), I can track the cost of a regular...

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America 2018: Dicier by the Day

2018-05-31

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2018-05-31

Venezuela is Annual Inflation Rate 2015-2018
Scrape all this putrid excrescence off and we're left with a non-fantasy reality: everything is getting dicier by the day. If we look beneath the cheery chatter of the financial media and the tiresomely repetitive Russian collusion narrative (that's unraveling as the Ministry of Propaganda's machinations are exposed), we find that America in 2018 is dicier by the day.

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How Systems Collapse

2018-05-30

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2018-05-30

System Collapse
This is how systems collapse: faith in the visible surface of abundance reigns supreme, and the fragility of the buffers goes unnoticed. I often discuss systems and systemic collapse, and I've drawn up a little diagram to illustrate a key dynamic in systemic collapse. The key concepts here are stability and buffers. Though complex systems are never static, but they can be stable: that is, they ebb and flow within relatively stable boundaries...

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Sustainability Boils Down to Scale

2018-05-25

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2018-05-25

Black Market Exchange Rate of Venezuelan Bolivar to US Dollar, 2010 - 2018
Only small scale systems can sustainably impose "skin in the game"-- consequences, accountability and oversight. Several conversations I had at the recent Peak Prosperity conference in Sonoma, CA sparked an insight into why societies and economies thrive or fail: It All Boils Down to Scale. In a conversation with a Peak Prosperity member who goes by MemeMonkey, MemeMonkey pointed out that social / economic organizations that function well at small...

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