Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

This is one reason why I anticipate "unexpected" disruptions in the global economy in 2018. The mere mention of "central banks" will likely turn off many readers who understandably have little interest in convoluted policies and arcane mumbo-jumbo, but bear with me for a few paragraphs while I make the case for something to happen in 2018 that will impact us all to some degree.

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Our current socio-economic system is nothing but the application of force on the many to enforce the skims, scams and privileges of the self-serving few. I've placed the word capitalism in quotation marks to reflect the reality that this word now covers a wide spectrum of economic activities, very little of which is actually capitalism as classically defined.

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The psychology of blowoff tops in asset bubbles is fascinating: let's start with the first requirement of a move qualifying as a blowoff top, which is the vast majority of participants deny the move is a blowoff top.

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This is how our entire status quo maintains the illusion of normalcy: by avoiding a full accounting of the costs. The economy's going great--but at what cost? "Normalcy" has been restored, but at what cost? Profits are soaring, but at what cost? Our pain is being reduced--but at what cost? The status quo delights in celebrating gains, but the costs required to generate those gains are ignored for one simple reason: the costs exceed the gains by a...

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Central banks are now trapped. In a nutshell, central banks are promising to "normalize" their monetary policy extremes in 2018. Nice, but there's a problem: you can't "normalize" markets that are now entirely dependent on extremes of monetary stimulus. Attempts to "normalize" will break the markets and the financial system. Let's start with the core dynamic of the global economy and nosebleed-valuation markets: credit.

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Financial and political power are two sides of one coin. We all know the rich are getting richer, and the super-rich are getting super-richer. This reality is illustrated in the chart of income gains, the vast majority of which have flowed to the top .01%--not the top 1%, or the top .1% -- to the very tippy top of the wealth-power pyramid.

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Note that widening wealth and income inequality is a non-partisan trend. One of the core goals of the Federal Reserve's monetary policies of the past 9 years is to generate the "wealth effect": by pushing the valuations of stocks and bonds higher, American households will feel wealthier, and hence be more willing to borrow and spend, even if they didn't actually reap any gains by selling stocks and bonds that gained value.

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A more human world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo. Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn't leave much to be happy about.

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Judging by this year's version of Santa Claus's reliable year-end stock market rally, risk has vanished, not just in stocks but in bonds, junk bonds, housing, commercial real estate, collectible art--just about the entire spectrum of tradable assets (with precious metals and agricultural commodities among the few receiving coals rather than rallies).

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