Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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What’s Truly Important? The Global Revaluation Is Accelerating

2022-07-27

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2022-07-27

How much gold will you trade for a few eggs? It depends on how hungry you are. Two ideas will help us understand the rest of this tumultuous decade: core-periphery and the revaluation of what's truly important: systemic adaptability, transparency, accountability, risk, capital and resources.

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Why the Labor Shortage Isn’t Going Away

2022-07-21

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2022-07-21

It's getting hard to fill toxic low-pay jobs, and that's not going to change. The nature of work and the labor market are changing in ways few discern or perhaps are willing to discern because these changes are disrupting the exploitive system they want to remain unchanged. But refusing to discern change doesn't stop change.

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The Real Policy Error Is Expanding Debt and Calling It "Growth"

2022-07-20

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2022-07-20

Waste is not growth, and neither are the unlimited expansion of debt and speculative bubbles. The financial punditry is whipping itself into a frenzy about a Federal Reserve "policy error," which is code for "if the music finally stops, we're doomed!"

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The Only Real Solution Is Default

2022-07-19

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2022-07-19

The destruction of 'phantom wealth' via default has always been the only way to clear the financial system of unpayable debt burdens and extremes of rentier / wealth dominance. The notion that the world could always borrow more money as long as interest rates were near-zero was never sustainable.

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US Dollar Strength: “Unintended Consequences” Or “The Empire Strikes Back”?

2022-07-14

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2022-07-14

How unintended can these consequences be? My guess: not very. A great many people got the U.S. dollar trade wrong. The conventional view held that "printing money", i.e. expanding the supply of money, would automatically devalue the currency. It isn't quite so simple, it seems.

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Calm Before the Tempest?

2022-07-13

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2022-07-13

Is it beyond conception that the core actually strengthens for a length of time before the unraveling reaches it?Let's start by stipulating the obvious: no one knows the future, and most of the guesses--oops, I mean forecasts--will be wrong. Arguing about the forecasts now won't make any difference as to which ones are correct and which ones are wrong.

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Why Nations Fail

2022-07-12

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2022-07-12

The irony is that the suppression of dissent is the suppression of competing ideas that generate systemic stability via rapid adaptation. Nations that appear stable may fail once they're under pressure.

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You Know What Would Be Really Irritating? A Crazy Rally to New Highs

2022-07-08

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2022-07-08

It would be very irritating to have a rally suck in all the bears salivating for a crash from a bear-market rally peak and then decimate the shorts with a rally that soars rather than collapses to new lows. As a contrarian, I'm always squinting at the consensus and wondering if it is really that easy to be right.

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The One Solution to All Our Problems

2022-07-06

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2022-07-06

Pick one, America: national security of the essential material foundation of everything, the industrial base, or "global markets," maximizing greed / corporate profits.Sorry about the clickbait title.

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The Most Valuable Form of Money Nobody’s Seen–Yet

2022-07-04

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2022-07-04

What is "money"? "Money" is a claim on the essentials of life. Ration cards are claims on essentials.Many people expect "money" will soon be tied to commodities. Agreed. It's called a ration cardthat grants the holder the right to buy a specific quantity of essential goods at a specified price.

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Why the Housing Bubble Bust Is Baked In

2022-07-01

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2022-07-01

Putting this all together, it's clear that the source of the current housing bubble is the explosion of financial speculation fueled by central bank policies. Those benefiting from speculative bubbles have powerful incentives to deny the bubble can bust.

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The Age of Discord

2022-06-28

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2022-06-28

It's very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord. Today's topic echoes Peter Turchin's 2016 book, Ages of Discord, which I have often referenced in blog posts.

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Our No-Win "Kobayashi Maru" Economy

2022-06-25

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2022-06-25

It's time to reprogram the conditions of the economy to serve the many rather than the few.Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru training exercise tests officer candidates' response to a no-win scenario:any attempt to rescue the crippled ship's crew results in the destruction of the candidate's ship, while standing by and taking no action results in the loss of the Kobayashi Maru's crew.

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The Difference Between a Forecast and a Guess

2022-06-22

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2022-06-22

Every forecast or guess has one refreshing quality: one will be right and the rest will be wrong. What's the difference between a forecast and a guess? On one level, the answer is "none": the future is unknown and even the most informed forecast is still a guess.

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Could Retail “Bagholders” Spark a Rally “Smart Money” Will Be Forced to Chase?

2022-06-17

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2022-06-17

There would be some deliciously karmic justice in the "dumb money" driving a rally that forced the "smart money" to cover their shorts and chase the rally that shouldn't even be happening.

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What Happens When the Workforce No Longer Wants to Work?

2022-06-15

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2022-06-15

Workers are voting with their feet, and that's difficult to control. When values and expectations change, everything else eventually changes, too. What happens when the workforce no longer wants to work? We're about to find out. As with all cultural sea changes, macro statistics don't tell the full story.

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There’s No Stopping a Recessionary Reckoning

2022-06-09

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2022-06-09

If there was only one causal factor nudging the economy into recession, it might be a mild, brief recession. But with all five conditions in confluence, this recession will be unlike any other. Recessions reliably arise from the confluence of these conditions. Note that any one condition can trigger a recession, but no one condition guarantees a recession.

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"Pay-to-Play" for the Rest of Us

2022-06-06

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2022-06-06

The more kafkaesque quagmires you've slogged through, the more you hope "pay-to-play for the rest of us" beomes ubiquitous. You know how "pay-to-play" works: contribute a couple of million dollars to key political players, and then get your tax break, subsidy, no-bid contract, etc., slipped into some nook or cranny of the legislative process that few (if any) will notice because the legislation is hundreds of pages long or a "gut and replace" magic...

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Who’s Going to Fix What’s Broken?

2022-06-04

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2022-06-04

When nobody cares that systems have broken down and there is no will or interest in fixing essential systems, there is no happy ending. Who fixes systems when they break down? The answer appears to be: nobody.

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Why America Decays: The Tyranny of Self-Interest

2022-06-01

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2022-06-01

Only those societies which still have a functional public interest / common good will survive; those ruled by the tyranny of self-interest will fall. I've discussed the moral rot consuming the American Project in blog posts and my books.

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