Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

This may be one of many revaluations of capital vis a vis labor and resources and core vis a vis periphery. You’ve heard the expression “cash is king.” Very true. But it’s equally true that “crash is king:” when speculative excesses collapse under their own extremes, the crash crushes all other narratives and becomes the dominant dynamic. Everything that the mainstream uses to predict “value,” market action and “the future” is tossed out the window. Price-earnings,...

Nothing unravels quite as dramatically as systems which are presumed to be rock-solid and forever. Here’s the default Bullish case for stocks and the economy: let’s call it Plan Zero. 1. The economy and equities can grow forever (a.k.a. infinite growth on a finite planet in a waste-is-growth Landfill Economy) 2. Higher energy costs have near-zero effect on the economy and stocks. 3. The Federal Reserve will deliver a soft landing which reduces inflation back to...

Let’s ask “cui bono” of the $33 trillion in added debt and the $9 trillion added to GDP: to whose benefit? I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to get our heads around big numbers. Technical analyst Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) recently provided one method to grasp the immense wealth of Elon Musk: How to become as wealthy as Elon Musk? Easy. Get paid $1 Million every single day. For 750 years in a row and you’re there. How can we get a handle on the $33...

When the system can’t borrow more and distribute the insolvency, it implodes I started writing about debt saturation back in 2011. The basic idea is we can continue to borrow and spend as long as one of two conditions hold: 1) real (inflation-adjusted) income is rising, so there’s more income to service additional debt, or 2) the cost of borrowing declines so the same income can support more debt. After 13 long years of declining interest rates and stagnant...

Most people would be horrified by a 40% decline in their “investments.” When bubbles pop, speculative assets don’t drop 40%, they drop 90% or even 98%. The irony of the sudden panic about real-world inflation generated by rising wages is two-fold: 1. The status quo never mentions the rampant inflation in assets, because the already-wealthy got wealthier, so asset inflation is wonderful and deserves to be permanent Look at the chart below (courtesy of Mac10) of the...

Those trusting the Fed to be visibly weak, corrupt and incompetent forever might be in for an unwelcome surprise. When even the crash test dummies are nervous, it pays to pay attention. Being in a mild crash isn’t too bad if all the protective devices inflate as intended. But in a horrific crash where nothing goes as planned, it’s like speeding in a ready-to-explode Pinto and being side-swiped by a semi on Dead Man’s Curve. The stock market is in the Pinto, and the...

As for our central banks’ defaulting on their lines of credit with the Martian Central Bank–that’s another alien intervention we’ll live to regret. I hope this won’t shock the more sensitive readers too greatly, but I’ve discovered undeniable evidence that all our planet’s problems are the result of alien intervention. Yes, aliens exist and are actively intervening in humanity’s activities, to our great detriment. Wars, plagues, The Illuminati, the World Economic...

Stocks don’t vanish when sold; somebody owns the shares all the way to the bottom. These owners who refuse to sell because they have convinced themselves the next dip will be the hoped-for resumption of the bullish trend are called “bagholders.” Trends are tricky. Humans anticipate the present conditions will continue on into the future. In economics and finance, we call this continuation a “trend.” Trends continue until something fundamental changes and the trend...

This desire for compliance and consensus dooms the autocracy to failure and collapse because dissent is the essence of evolutionary churn and adaptation..The various flavors of autocracy (theocracy, kleptocracy, dictatorship, etc.) look remarkably successful at first blush but they all share a fatal flaw. To understand the flaw we must start with the dominant dynamic of all organisms, natural selection. Things change. Those organisms which adapt quickly and...

All this decay is so incremental that nobody thinks it possible that it could ever accumulate into a risk that threatens the entire system. The funny thing about risk is the risk that everyone sees isn’t the risk that blows up the system. The mere fact that everyone is paying attention to the risk tends to defang it as everyone rushes to hedge or reduce the risk. It’s the risk that accumulates under everyone’s radar that takes down the system. There are several...