Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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Want Widespread Prosperity? Radically Lower Costs

2017-11-22

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2017-11-22

Selected Goods Price Changes, 1996 - 2016
As long as this is business as usual, it's impossible to slash costs and boost widespread prosperity. It's easy to go down the wormhole of complexity when it comes to figuring out why our economy is stagnating for the bottom 80% of households. But it's actually not that complicated: the primary driver of stagnation, decline of small business start-ups, etc. is costs are skyrocketing to the point of unaffordability.

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Is This Why Productivity Has Tanked and Wealth Inequality Has Soared?

2017-11-17

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2017-11-17

US Productivity Growth, 1980 - 2016
Needless but highly profitable forced-upgrades are the bread and butter of the tech industry. One of the enduring mysteries in conventional economics (along with why wages for the bottom 95% have stagnated) is the recent decline in productivity gains (see chart).

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Forget the Bogus Republican “Reform”: Here’s What Real Tax Reform Would Look Like

2017-11-16

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2017-11-16

US Household Incomes, 1980 - 2014
The point is to end the current system in which billionaires get all the privileges and financial benefits of owning assets in the U.S. but don't pay taxes that are proportional to the benefits they extract. As has been widely noted, the Republicans' proposed "tax reform" is not only just more BAU (business as usual, i.e. cut taxes for the wealthy), it's also not real reform. At best, it's just another iteration of D.C. policy tweaks packaged for...

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The Fetid Swamp of Tax Reform

2017-11-15

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2017-11-15

Average Benefits Received and Taxes Paid per Person
The likelihood that either party will ever drain the fetid swamp of corruption that is our tax code is zero, because it's far too profitable for politicos to operate their auction for tax favors. To understand the U.S. tax code and the endless charade of tax reform, we have to start with four distasteful realities: 1. Ours is not a representational democracy, it's a political auction in which wealth casts the votes that count.

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Where are Europe’s Fault Lines?

2017-11-14

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2017-11-14

Map
Beneath the surface of modern maps, numerous old fault lines still exist. A political earthquake or two might reveal the fractures for all to see. Correspondent Mark G. and I have long discussed the potential relevancy of old boundaries, alliances and structures in Europe's future alignments.Examples include the Holy Roman Empire and the Hanseatic League, among others.

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Our Culture of Rape

2017-11-13

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2017-11-13

Global Wealth Pyramid
These are the poisoned fruits of a neofeudal system in which power, wealth and political influence are concentrated in the apex of the wealth-power pyramid. Stripped of pretense, ours is a culture of rape. Apologists for the system that spawned this culture of rape claim that this violence is the work of a few scattered sociopaths. The apologists are wrong: The system generates a culture of rape.

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How Will Bitcoin React in a Financial Crisis Like 2008?

2017-11-09

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2017-11-09

Bitcoin Distribution
Whenever I raise the topic of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, I feel like an agnostic in the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants. There is precious little neutral ground in the crypto-is-a-bubble battle; one side is absolutely confident that bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies are in a tulip-bulb type bubble, while the other camp is equally confident that we ain't seen nuthin' yet in terms of bitcoin's future valuation.

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Let’s Clear Up One Confusion About Bitcoin

2017-11-09

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2017-11-09

Bitcoin One-year Chart, Jan - Oct 2017
If bitcoin can be converted into fiat currencies at a lower transaction cost than the fiat-to-fiat conversions made by banks and credit card companies, it's a superior means of exchange. One of the most common comments I hear from bitcoin skeptics goes something like this: Bitcoin isn't real money until I can buy a cup of coffee with it. In other words, bitcoin fails the first of the two core tests of "money": that it is a means of exchange and a...

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The Big Reversal: Inflation and Higher Interest Rates Are Coming Our Way

2017-11-07

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2017-11-07

Bank of Japan Balance Sheet, 1998 - 2016
This interaction will spark a runaway feedback loop that will smack asset valuations back to pre-bubble, pre-pyramid scheme levels. According to the conventional economic forecast, interest rates will stay near-zero essentially forever due to slow growth. And since growth is slow, inflation will also remain neutral.

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What’s Driving Social Discord: Russian Social Media Meddling or Soaring Wealth/Power Inequality?

2017-11-05

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2017-11-05

Boris Natasha
The nation's elites are desperate to misdirect us from the financial and power dividethat has enriched and empowered them at the expense of the unprotected many. There are two competing explanatory narratives battling for mind-share in the U.S.: 1. The nation's social discord is the direct result of Russian social media meddling-- what I call the Boris and Natasha Narrative of evil Russian masterminds controlling a vast conspiracy of social media...

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What the Kennedy Assassination Records Reveal: Uncontrollable Incompetence

2017-11-04

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2017-11-04

Propaganda Ministry 2017
One way to interpret the intelligence community's reluctance to let all the Kennedy assassination archives become public is that the archives contain evidence of a "smoking gun": that is, evidence that the intelligence agencies of the United States of America were complicit in the assassination of the President.

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Observations on Wealth-Income Inequality (from Federal Reserve Reports)

2017-11-03

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2017-11-03

Percent of Families with business equity, 1989 - 2016
There's a profound difference between assets that produce no income and those that produce net income. To those of us nutty enough to pore over dozens of pages of data on wealth and income in the U.S., the Federal Reserve's quarterly Z.1 reports and annual Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) are treasure troves, as are I.R.S. tax and income reports.

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Where To Invest When (Almost) Everything’s in a Bubble

2017-11-02

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2017-11-02

S&P 500 and US Home Price Index, 1980 - 2017
Many things that are scarce and thus valuable cannot be bought on the global marketplace. Now that almost every asset class is in a bubble, the question of where to invest one's capital has become particularly vexing. The ashes of wealth consumed by the 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown are still warm, at least to those who never recovered, and so buying assets at nosebleed valuations in the hopes of earning another 5% aren't very compelling to...

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What Could Pop The Everything Bubble?

2017-11-01

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2017-11-01

Selected Consumer Goods and Services Price Changes, 1996 - 2016
As central bank policies are increasingly fingered by the mainstream as the source of soaring wealth-income inequality, policies supporting credit/asset bubbles will either be limited or cut off, and at that point all the credit/asset bubbles will pop.

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Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

2017-10-30

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2017-10-30

Percent of Total Assets and Liabilities
The majority of middle class wealth is locked up in unproductive assets or assets that only become available upon retirement or death. One of my points in Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin was to highlight how few families had the financial wherewithal to invest in bitcoin or an alternative hedge such as precious metals.

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Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin

2017-10-28

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2017-10-28

Value of Financial Assets for Families with holdings, 1989 - 2016
Those who see governments banning ownership of bitcoin are ignoring the political power and influence of those who are snapping up most of the bitcoin. To really understand an asset, we have to examine not just the asset itself but who owns it, and who can afford to own it. These attributes will illuminate the political and financial power wielded by the owners of the asset class.

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Which Rotten Fruit Falls First?

2017-10-23

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2017-10-23

US Gross Domestic Product, 1940 - 2017
I predict the current investigations will widen and take a variety of twists and turns that surprise all those anticipating a tidy, narrowly focused denouement. The theme this week is The Rot Within. To those of us who understand the entire status quo is rotten and corrupt to its core, the confidence of each ideological camp that their side will emerge unscathed by investigation is a source of amusement.

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GDP Is Bogus: Here’s Why

2017-10-22

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2017-10-22

US Real GDP, 1940 - 2017
The rot eating away at our society and economy is typically papered over with bogus statistics that "prove" everything's getting better every day in every way. The prime "proof" of rising prosperity is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which never fails to loft higher, with the rare excepts being Spots of Bother (recessions) that never last more than a quarter or two.

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Fraud, Exploitation and Collusion: America’s Pharmaceutical Industry

2017-10-22

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2017-10-22

The rot within manifested by the pharmaceutical industry almost defies description.The theme this week is The Rot Within. America's Pharmaceutical industry takes pride of place in this week's theme of The Rot Within, as the industry has raised fraud, exploitation and collusion to systemic perfection. What other industry can routinely kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and suffer no blowback? Only recently has the toll of needless deaths from...

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The Fading Scent of the American Dream

2017-10-18

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2017-10-18

US Household Income, 1980 - 2014
The theme this week is The Rot Within. It's been 10 years since I devoted a week to the theme of The Rot Within (September 17, 2007). Back in 2007, I listed 16 systemic sources of rot in our society, politics and economy; none have been fixed. Instead, the gaping holes have been filled with Play-Do and hastily painted to create the illusion of shiny solidity.

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