Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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The Genie’s Out of the Bottle: Eight Defining Trends Are Reversing

2018-04-15

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2018-04-15

The Fruit of Financialization, 1980 - 2014
Though the Powers That Be will attempt to placate or suppress the Revolt of the Powerless, the genies of political disunity and social disorder cannot be put back in the bottle. The saying "the worm has turned" refers to the moment when the downtrodden have finally had enough, and turn on their powerful oppressors.

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Why Systems Fail

2018-04-10

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2018-04-10

Federal Government, 2005 - 2018
Since failing systems are incapable of structural reform, collapse is the only way forward. Systems fail for a wide range of reasons, but I'd like to focus on two that are easy to understand but hard to pin down. Systems are accretions of structures and modifications laid down over time.Each layer adds complexity which is viewed at the time as a solution. This benefits insiders, as their job security arises from the need to manage the added...

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Were Trade Wars Inevitable?

2018-04-09

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2018-04-09

US National Income, 1960 - 2018
Were trade wars inevitable? The answer is yes, due to the imbalances and distortions generated by financialization and central bank stimulus. Gordon Long and I peel the trade-war onion in a new video program, Were Trade Wars Inevitable?

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Playing for All the Marbles

2018-04-07

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2018-04-07

Asset Prices vs GDP, 1992 - 2016
Global Plunge Protection Teams must be ordering take-out food; every night is a long one now. The current stocks/bonds game is for all the marbles, by which I mean the status quo now depends on valuations and interest rates remaining near their current levels for the system to function.

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The Problem with a State-Cartel Economy: Prices Rise, Wages Don’t

2018-04-03

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2018-04-03

The Fruit of Financialization, 1980 - 2014
The vise will tighten until something breaks. It could be the currency, it could be the political status quo, it could be the credit/debt system--or all three. The problem with an economy dominated by state-enforced cartels and quasi-monopolies is that prices rise (since cartels can push higher costs onto the consumer) but wages don't (since cartels can either dominate local labor markets or engage in global wage arbitrage: offshore jobs, move to...

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What If All the Cheap Stuff Goes Away?

2018-04-02

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2018-04-02

GSCI/S&P 500 Ratio, 1971 - 2017
Nothing stays the same in dynamic systems, and it's inevitable that the current glut of low costs / cheap stuff will give way to scarcities that cannot be filled at current low prices. One of the books I just finished reading is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire.

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15 Years of War: To Whose Benefit?

2018-03-30

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2018-03-30

National Income: Corporate Profits Before Tax, 1960 - 2018
As for Iraq, the implicit gain was supposed to be access to Iraqi oil. Setting aside the 12 years of "no fly zone" air combat operations above Iraq from 1991 to 2003, the U.S. has been at war for almost 17 years in Afghanistan and 15 years in Iraq. (If the word "war" is too upsetting, then substitute "continuing combat operations".)

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Decrypting the Appointment of John Bolton

2018-03-26

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2018-03-26

Mr Bolton
So perhaps the dominant wing of the Deep State is finally willing to cut a deal with Trump. To many observers, the appointment of John Bolton as national security advisor is the functional equivalent of appointing the Anti-Christ--or maybe worse. Indeed, these observers would, when comparing the two, find grudging favor with the Anti-Christ.

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Should Facebook and Google Pay Users When They Sell Data Collected from Users?

2018-03-24

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2018-03-24

The Dominance of Google and Facebook, 2014 - 2015
Let's imagine a model in which the marketers of data distribute some of their immense profits to the users who created and thus "own" the data being sold for a premium. It's not exactly news that Facebook, Google and other "free" services reap billions of dollars in profits by selling data mined/collected from their millions of users. As we know, If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold, also phrased as if...

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Solutions Only Arise Outside the Status Quo

2018-03-22

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2018-03-22

Lifecycle of Bureaucracy
Solutions are only possible outside these ossified, self-serving centralized hierarchies. Correspondent Dan F. asked me to reprint some posts on solutions to the systemic problems I've outlined for years, most recently in How Much Longer Can We Get Away With It? and Checking In on the Four Intersecting Cycles. I appreciate the request, because it's all too easy to dwell on what's broken rather than on the difficult task of fixing what's broken.

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Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy?

2018-03-21

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2018-03-21

Dominance of Google and Facebook, 2014 - 2015
As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 2016. The Washington Post saw fit to promote ProporNot's propaganda operation because it aligned with the newspaper's view that any site that wasn't pro-status quo was propaganda; the possibility of reasoned dissent has vanished into a void of warring accusations of propaganda and "fake news" --which is of course propaganda in...

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Checking In on the Four Intersecting Cycles

2018-03-18

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2018-03-18

Intersection of Four Long-Term Cycles, 1900 - 2020
Correspondent James D. recently asked for an update on the four intersecting cycles I've been writing about for the past 10 years. Here's the chart I prepared back in 2008 of four long-term cycles: 1. Generational (political/social).2. Price inflation/wage stagnation (economic). 3. Credit/debt expansion/contraction (financial). 4. Relative affordability of energy (resources).

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How Much Longer Can We Get Away With It?

2018-03-18

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2018-03-18

Debt Securities and Loans, 1960 - 2018
Alas, fakery isn't actually a solution to fiscal/financial crisis.. This chart of "debt securities and loans"--i.e. total debt in the U.S. economy--is also a chart of the creation and distribution of new money, as the issuance of new debt is the mechanism in our financial system for creating (or "emitting" in economic jargon) new currency: when a bank issues a new home mortgage, for example, the loan amount is new currency created out of the...

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There is No “Free Trade”–There Is Only the Darwinian Game of Trade

2018-03-15

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2018-03-15

Corporate Profits After Tax, 1950 - 2018
Rising income and wealth inequality is causally linked to globalization and the expansion of Darwinian trade and capital flows. Stripped of lofty-sounding abstractions such as comparative advantage, trade boils down to four Darwinian goals: 1. Find foreign markets to absorb excess production, i.e. where excess production can be dumped. 2. Extract foreign resources at low prices. 3. Deny geopolitical rivals access to these resources.

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Forget “Free Trade”–It’s All About Capital Flows

2018-03-11

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2018-03-11

Corporate Profits after Tax, 1950 - 2017
Defenders and critics of "free trade" and globalization tend to present the issue as either/or: it's inherently good or bad. In the real world, it's not that simple. The confusion starts with defining free trade (and by extension, globalization).

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The Death of Buy and Hold: We’re All Traders Now

2018-03-09

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2018-03-09

Asset Prices vs GDP, 1992 - 2016
The percentage of household assets invested in stocks fell from almost 40% in 1969 to a mere 13% in 1982, after thirteen years of grinding losses. The conventional wisdom of financial advisors--to save money and invest it in stocks and bonds "for the long haul"--a "buy and hold" strategy that has functioned as the default setting of financial planning for the past 60 years--may well be disastrously wrong for the next decade.

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Never Mind Volatility: Systemic Risk Is Rising

2018-03-07

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2018-03-07

S&P 500, 2008 - 2018
So who's holding the hot potato of systemic risk now? Everyone. One of the greatest con jobs of the past 9 years is the status quo's equivalence of risk and volatility: risk = volatility: so if volatility is low, then risk is low. Wrong: volatility once reflected specific short-term aspects of risk, but measures of volatility such as the VIX have been hijacked to generate the illusion that risk is low.

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Our Fragmented Labor Markets Defy Outdated Conventions

2018-03-03

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2018-03-03

Annual Growth of Hourly Earnings, Jan 1965 - 2018
There are hundreds of extraordinarily diverse labor markets in the U.S. economy, and it takes a much more granulated approach to make any sense of this highly fragmented and dynamic marketplace. onventional economists/media pundits typically view the labor market as monolithic, i.e. as one unified market. The reality is the labor market is highly fragmented. Thus it's little wonder that conventional measures are giving mixed signals on employment,...

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Career Advice to 20-Somethings: Create Value as a Mobile Creative

2018-03-02

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2018-03-02

Federal Government; Consumer Credit, Student Loans; Asset, Level, 2005 - 2018
Finding work that fits who you are is rarely easy, especially if you don't fit into the mainstream, and usually it requires a lot of compromises, hard work and dead-ends. But that’s the process. Establishing a satisfying career is difficult in today's economy, doubly so for those who find life within hierarchical institutions (corporate America and government) unrewarding, and triply so for those burdened with student loan debt and college...

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Venezuela’s New Cryptocurrency: Just Another Form of Control Fraud

2018-02-25

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2018-02-25

Black Market Exchange Rate, 2010 - 2018
The broke and broken country of Venezuela appears to be the first nation-state to issue a cryptocurrency token (the petro) as a means of escaping the financial black hole that's consuming its economy: Maduro Launches Oil-Backed Crypto "For The Welfare Of Venezuela".

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