Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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The Real Threat to Democracy is Corrupting Wealth Inequality

2022-01-11

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2022-01-11

Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the top few collect more than 97% of the income from capital. There aren't any that top the USA, the world's most extreme kleptocracy. We're Number 1. Imagine a town of 1,000 adults and their dependents in which one person holds the vast majority of wealth and political influence. Would that qualify as a democracy?

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Why Don’t We Cut Out the Middleman and Just Elect Pfizer and Merck?

2022-01-10

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2022-01-10

If we no longer have the capacity to distinguish between moral legitimacy and self-serving corruption, then we might as well eliminate the Middleman and vote directly for Pfizer or Merck. There's a fancy word for cutting out the Middleman: disintermediation. Removing intermediaries who take a cut but neither produce nor add value makes perfect sense, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

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The Economy / Market Look “Healthy” Until They Have a Seizure and Collapse

2022-01-06

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2022-01-06

So one index or asset or another hits a new high, wow, more proof everything is so robust and healthy, we never had it so good--right up to the seizure and collapse.

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What Will Surprise Us in 2022

2022-01-04

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2022-01-04

What seemed so permanent for 13 long years will be revealed as shifting sand and what seemed so real for 13 long years will be revealed as illusion. Magical thinking isn't optimism, it is folly. Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but let's look at what we already know about 2022.

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Watch the Top 5percent – They’re the Key to the Whole Economy

2021-12-26

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2021-12-26

Go ahead and become dependent on asset bubbles and the free spending of the top 5%, and optimize your economy to serve this "growth," but be prepared for the consequences when the costs of this optimization and dependency come due.

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One Chart Traders Might Want to Ponder

2021-12-21

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2021-12-21

But when the Fed's fundamental powerlessness is revealed and the buy-the-dippers have been forced to liquidate, the true meaning of "mild" contagion will become apparent. Since I'd rather not be renditioned to a rat-infested, freezing cell in an unnamed 'stan, I'm circumspect about viruses in general.

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How Vulnerable Is Your Personal Supply Chain?

2021-12-20

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2021-12-20

How vulnerable is your personal supply chain? For the average American, the answer is: very. Americans consider abundance and ready availability as birthrights so basic they're like the air we breathe. The idea that shelves could become bare and stay bare is incomprehensible. yet that is the world we're entering, for a number of complex reasons.

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Smart Enough to Get Rich, Not Smart Enough to Keep It

2021-12-19

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2021-12-19

Are we smart enough to keep our oh-so-easily conjured riches? If we continue to believe that doing more of what's failed spectacularly will deliver permanently expanding riches, then the answer is no.

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Get in Crash Positions

2021-12-13

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2021-12-13

When the market goes bidless, it's too late to preserve capital, never mind all those life-changing gains. Everyone with some gray in their ponytails knows the stock market has ticked every box for a bubble top, so everybody get in crash positions: Let's run through the requirements for a bubble top: 1. Retail investors (i.e. dumb money) are all in and buying the dip with absolute confidence.

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Xi’s Gambit: China at the Crossroads

2021-12-10

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2021-12-10

If Xi's gambit succeeds, China could become a magnet for global capital. If success is only partial or temporary, China may well struggle with the structural excesses that are piling up not just in China but in the entire global economy.

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The Long Cycles Have All Turned: Look Out Below

2021-12-03

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2021-12-03

But alas, humans do not possess god-like powers, they only possess hubris, and so all bubbles pop: the more extreme the bubble, the more devastating the pop. Long cycles operate at such a glacial pace they're easily dismissed as either figments of fevered imagination or this time it's different.

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Why Inflation Is a Runaway Freight Train

2021-11-30

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2021-11-30

The value of these super-abundant follies will trend rapidly to zero once margin calls and other bits of reality drastically reduce demand. Inflation, deflation, stagflation--they've all got proponents. But who's going to be right?

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When Risk and Opportunity Become Personal

2021-11-25

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2021-11-25

The opportunity to lower our exposure to risk is always present in some fashion, but embracing this opportunity becomes critical when precarity and change-points rise like restless seas.

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When Everything Is Artifice and PR, Collapse Beckons

2021-11-23

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2021-11-23

The notion that consequence can be as easily managed as PR is the ultimate artifice and the ultimate delusion. The consequences of the drip-drip-drip of moral decay is difficult to discern in day-to-day life. It's easy to dismiss the ubiquity of artifice, PR, spin, corruption, racketeering, fraud, collusion and narrative manipulation (a.k.a. propaganda) as nothing more than human nature, but this dismissal of moral decay is nothing more than...

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The Fed’s Moral Hazard Monster Is About to Lay Waste to “Wealth”

2021-11-22

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2021-11-22

If the Fed set out to destroy the financial system, they're very close to finishing the job. If you set out to destroy markets and the financial system, your most important weapon is moral hazard, the disconnection of risk and consequence. You disconnect risk from consequence by rewarding those making the riskiest bets and bailing out gamblers whose bets went bad.

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Top 1% Gains More Wealth Than the Combined GDPs of Japan, Germany, UK, France, India and Italy, Bottom 50%–You Get Nothing

2021-11-18

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2021-11-18

Given that political power in America is a pay-to-play auction in which the highest bidder wins, how this incomprehensibly lopsided ownership of wealth plays out is an open question.

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Paging Isaac Newton: Time to Buy the Top of This Bubble

2021-11-16

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2021-11-16

Despite Newton's tremendous intelligence and experience, he fell victim to the bubble along with the vast herd of credulous greedy punters. One of the most famous examples of smart people being sucked into a bubble and losing a packet as a result is Isaac Newton's forays in and out of the 1720 South Seas Bubble that is estimated to have sucked in between 80% and 90% of the entire pool of investors in England.

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Look Out Below: Why a Rug-Pull Flash Crash Makes Perfect Sense

2021-11-15

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2021-11-15

It makes perfect financial sense to crash the market and no sense to reward the retail options marks by pushing it higher. An extraordinary opportunity to scoop up mega-millions in profits has arisen, and grabbing all this free money makes perfect financial sense. Now the question is: will those who have the means to grab the dough have the guts to do so?

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The Contrarian Trade of the Decade: The Dollar Refuses to Die

2021-11-14

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2021-11-14

Which is more valuable: Wall Street's debt/asset bubbles or the global empire? You can't have both, so choose wisely. The consensus makes sense: the U.S. dollar is doomed because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury will conjure trillions of new dollars out of thin air to prop up the status quo entitlements, monopolies, cartels and debt/asset bubbles, and since little of this issuance actually increases productivity, all it will accomplish is the...

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Eight Reasons Scarcities Will Increase Rather Than Evaporate

2021-11-09

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2021-11-09

Who knew it would be so easy? All we have to do is collect urine and we'll be flying our electric air taxi tomorrow! While the private-jet crowd is busy selling a future of 1 billion electric vehicles, 1 billion windmills, 1 billion solar arrays, hundreds of thousands of electric aircraft, thousands of new nuclear power plants and trillions more in "wealth" accumulating in their bloated ledgers, reality is intruding on their technocratic...

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