Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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 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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The quality, durability, utility and enjoyment-of-use of our products and services has been plummeting for years. One of the more mysterious aspects of the official inflation rate is the hedonic quality adjustments that the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes to the components of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The basic idea is that when innovations improve the utility (and pleasure derived from) a product, the price is adjusted to reflect this...

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Dear local leadership: here's the formula for long-term success. A Great Migration of the Tax Donkeys is underway, still very much under the radar of the mainstream media and conventional economists. If you are confident no such migration of those who pay the bulk of the taxes could ever occur, please consider the long-term ramifications of these two articles.

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I would hazard a guess that an increasing number of tax donkeys are considering dropping out as a means of increasing their happiness and satisfaction with life. Since federal income taxes are in the spotlight, let's ask a question that rarely (if ever) makes it into the public discussion: what if the tax donkeys who pay most of the tax rebel? There are several likely reasons why this question rarely arises.

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These expedient fixes end up crippling the mechanisms that are needed to actually solve the systemic sources of the crisis. We can add a third certainty to the two standard ones (death and taxes): The rules will suddenly change when a financial crisis strikes. Why is this a certainty? The answer is complex, as it draws on human nature, politics and the structure of societies/economies ruled by centralized states (governments). The Core Imperative...

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Japan is a global leader is how to gracefully manage stagnation. Although our leadership is too polite to say it out loud, they've embraced stagnation as the new quasi-official policy. The reason is tragi-comically obvious: any real reform would threaten the income streams gushing into untouchably powerful self-serving elites and fiefdoms.

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There is nothing inevitable about such vast, fast-rising income-wealth inequality; it is the only possible output of our financial and pay-to-play political system. One chart defines the 21st century economy and thus its socio-political system: the chart of soaring wealth/income inequality. This chart doesn't show a modest widening in the gap between the super-wealthy (top 1/10th of 1%) and everyone else: there is a veritable Grand Canyon between...

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