Category Archive: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

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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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One Solution to Soaring Food Prices: Start Your 2022 Garden Now

2021-11-08

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2021-11-08

There is a great deal of joy and satisfaction in gardening; benefits include saving money, eating healthier, sharing the bounty with others and reducing the derealization / derangement of modern life.

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Whistleblowers Torpedo Facebook and Pfizer: Who’s Next?

2021-11-07

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2021-11-07

If America's total dependence on corporate profits and stock market/housing bubbles is just fine because the bubbles just keep inflating, there's nothing left but rot.

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Revenge of the Real World

2021-11-04

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2021-11-04

The status quo response would be amusing if the consequences weren't so dire. Rather than stare at empty shelves, you have two options for distraction: you can don a virtual-reality headset and cavort with dolphins in the metaverse, or you can trade various forms of phantom wealth that always go up (happy happy!) because the Fed.

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Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble? Yes

2021-11-02

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2021-11-02

The line of dominoes that is already toppling extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly. That China faces structural problems is well-recognized.

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Santa’s Revenge: Everyone Front-Running My Rally, You Get Nothing

2021-10-30

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2021-10-30

Santa is generally a jolly fellow, but that doesn't mean he doesn't take pleasure in meting our well-deserved punishment to the greedy.

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Doing 90 MPH on Deadman’s Curve: A Few Thoughts on Risk

2021-10-26

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2021-10-26

When the wreck is recovered, witnesses will wonder why they took such heedless, foolish risks. You're in the back seat wedged between tipsy revelers, the driver is drunk and heading into Deadman's Curve at 90 miles per hour. Nobody's worried because the driver has never crashed.

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America Is Now a Kleptocrapocracy

2021-10-23

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2021-10-23

I hope everyone here is hungry because the banquet of consequences is being served. I've coined a new portmanteau word to describe America's descent: kleptocrapocracy, a union of kleptocracy (a nation ruled by kleptocrats) and crapocracy, a nation drowning in a moral sewer of rampant self-interest in which the focus is cloaking all the skims, scams, rackets and bezzles in some virtuous-sounding garb, a nation choking on low-quality junk ceaselessly...

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Software Ate the World and Now Has Indigestion

2021-10-19

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2021-10-19

As for all those automated systems we have to navigate--do any of them work so well that those profiting from them actually use them? Of course not.

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Everything Solid Melts into Air

2021-10-16

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2021-10-16

That the neofeudal lords and their lackeys offer the debt-serfs "choices" of forced labor would be comic if the results weren't so tragic. We know we're close to the moment when Everything Solid Melts into Air when extraordinary breakdowns are treated as ordinary and the "news" quickly reverts to gossip.

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America’s Bottom 50 percent Have Nowhere To Go But Down

2021-10-14

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2021-10-14

One might anticipate that the bottom 50%'s meager share of the nation's exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no.

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Why Shortages Are Permanent: Global Supply Shortages Make Fantastic Financial Sense

2021-10-08

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2021-10-08

The era of abundance was only a short-lived artifact of the initial boost phase of globalization and financialization. Global corporations didn't go to all the effort to establish quasi-monopolies and cartels for our convenience--they did it to ensure reliably large profits from control and scarcity.

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