Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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The "Oil Curse" and Splashy PR Announcements of Oil Production Cuts

2022-11-29

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2022-11-29

It's not just the price of oil that matters: how much disposable income consumers have left to buy more goods and services matters, too. The Oil Curse (a.k.a. The Resource Curse) refers to the compelling ease of those blessed with an abundance of oil/resources to depend on that gift for the majority of state/national revenues.

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The Uncertainty in China Is Kryptonite to Global Markets

2022-11-28

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2022-11-28

Few seem alive to the potentially consequential financial risks arising from uncertainties evolving in China. One thing we know rather definitively is that markets don't like uncertainty: uncertainty is Kryptonite to markets. Another thing we know is that the events unfolding in China are generating uncertainty on multiple levels.

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There’s No Bottom Until Frenzied Speculation Turns to Dust

2022-11-21

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2022-11-21

Only when speculative sizzle attracts no buyers / marks will the bottom be in. There hasn't been a truly organic bottom in stocks in decades. Fifteen years of relentless central bank manipulation since the 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown has persuaded punters that central banks will always save us should the market turn down because relentless central bank suppression of interest rates and expansion of liquidity (a.k.a. free money for financiers)...

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FTX: The Dominoes of Financial Fraud Have Yet to Fall

2022-11-20

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2022-11-20

Once assets are revealed as worth far less than claimed, insolvency is the inevitable result. If you haven't plowed through dozens of post-collapse commentaries on FTX, I'm saving you the trouble: here's a distillation of what matters going forward. If you're seeking a forensic accounting of FTX, others have done this work already.

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Where Crypto Went Wrong

2022-11-15

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2022-11-15

You want to fix the world with finance? Then fix this: wages' share of a financialized, globalized, speculative-bubble dependent economy have been falling for decades. Fix this and you really will change the world. Anything less changes nothing.

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Asymmetries, Distortions and Denial

2022-11-14

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2022-11-14

When bubbles pop, it's natural selection at its most unforgiving: "adapt or die," and those who ignore or discount consequential asymmetries will have a very difficult time navigating the triage. After years of relative stability, it seems asymmetries, distortions and denial are playing out in unexpectedly destabilizing ways.

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The Unintended Consequences of Unintended Consequences

2022-11-08

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2022-11-08

Decades of central bank distortions and regulatory / market-share capture by cartels and monopolies have completely gutted "markets," destroying their self-correcting dynamics. Unintended consequences introduce unexpected problems that may not have easy solutions.

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What Does Liberation Mean in the Real World?

2022-10-31

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2022-10-31

Liberation in the real world is the result of self-reliance and investing in our own well-being.Liberation has many contexts. It can mean being freed from imprisonment or servitude, freedom from gnawing want or oppression, or being liberated from prisons of the mind.

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The End of the "Growth" Road

2022-10-27

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2022-10-27

Everyone caught by surprise that the infinite road actually has an end will face a bewildering transition. The End of the "Growth" Road is upon us, though the consensus continues to hold fast to the endearing fantasy of infinite expansion of consumption.

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Now That Housing Is Rolling Over, Is That Fixer-Upper a Deal?

2022-10-26

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2022-10-26

So-called "cosmetic work" can cost tens of thousands of dollars.Now that housing is finally rolling over due to rising mortgage rates and bubble valuations, many of those who have been priced out of the market are hoping to take advantage of lower prices.

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A Lesson in Markets and Bureaucracies: The Very Instructive History of Rat Farms

2022-10-22

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2022-10-22

In effect, authorities created two rat farms, both unintended: the sewers, and the private-sector rat-farms.The history of Rat Farms offers a valuable lesson in how markets and bureaucracies work. The story of how the colonial authorities in Hanoi came to establish two kinds of rat farms is highly instructive. The first rat farm was unintentional.

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What Everybody Knows No Longer Matters

2022-10-18

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2022-10-18

What nobody yet knows (or the few insiders who do know are keeping to themselves) is what will matter. Being a doom-and-gloom Bear stops being fun when the Bear Bar gets crowded.

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What If Everyone’s Wrong (Just Long Enough to Blow Up Their Account)?

2022-10-15

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2022-10-15

Trying to restore a system that is spiraling away from equilibrium with new extremes of obsolete, misguided policies only accelerates the swings from apparent stability to cascading chaos. The conventional view of the market is there are two sides to every trade and one is right and the other is wrong.

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Everything’s Fixed–Except What’s Broken

2022-10-13

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2022-10-13

Everything's fixed except what's no longer profitable to plunder. Underfunded, ignored, mismanaged by incompetents, it breaks. Everything's fixed--except what's broken. Hmm. Maybe we need to read that again.

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‘Quiet Quitting’ Isn’t Just About Jobs; It’s About a Crumbling Economy

2022-10-10

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2022-10-10

The unraveling of hyper-Globalization and hyper-Financialization will generate consequences few conventional analysts and pundits anticipate.

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Devil’s Advocates are Investors’ Best Friends

2022-10-04

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2022-10-04

If those on the opposite side of the trade are viewed as threats rather than friends, it's time to revise the analysis. Of the many self-generated dangers investors face, few are more dangerous than confirmation bias, the comfort we experience seeking out views that confirm our own positions and our resistance to studying opposing views.

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Charles Hugh Smith on Self Reliance in the 21st Century

2022-09-30

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Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/roundtableinsight http://financialrepressionauthority.com/2022/09/30/the-roundtable-insight-charles-hugh-smith-on-self-reliance-in-the-21st-century/

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Loonshots and Collapse

2022-09-28

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2022-09-28

The momentum of franchise success and centralization of power are fatal. Loonshots are like moonshots, only crazier and trickier to commercialize. Author Safi Bahcall titled his book on how to nurture change-the-world innovations Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.

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The End of Cheap Food

2022-09-18

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2022-09-18

Global food production rests on soil and rain. Robots don't change that. Of all the modern-day miracles, the least appreciated is the incredible abundance of low cost food in the U.S. and other developed countries.The era of cheap food is ending, for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons.

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The Fourth Turn, Turn, Turn

2022-09-15

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2022-09-15

The cycles of The Fourth Turning, Fischer and Turchin are all in alignment at this point in history.. The 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy proposed a cyclical pattern of four 20-year generations which culminate in a national crisis every 80 years.

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