Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

If AI isn’t self-aware of the fact it is nothing but an exploitive tool of the powerful, then it’s worthless. The latest wave of AI tools is generating predictably giddy exaltations. These range from gooey, gloppy technocratic worship of the new gods (“AI will soon walk on water!”) to the sloppy wet kisses of manic fandom (“AI cleaned up my code, wrote my paper on quantum physics and cured my sensitive bowel!”) The hype obscures the fundamental reality that all...

The unencumbered realist concludes that there are no solutions within a status quo structure that is itself the problem. Realists who question received wisdom and conclude the status quo is untenable are quickly labeled pessimistsbecause the zeitgeist expects a solution is always at hand–preferably a technocratic one that requires zero sacrifice and doesn’t upset the status quo apple cart. Realists ask “what if” without selecting the “solution” first. The...

Our time is better invested in actually learning about trends that impact us directly. Imagine making this simple change in your life: whatever you don’t control, you stop paying attention to it.This includes a vast array of “news” and “crises” that we have zero control over: the wretched flooding in Timbukthree, geopolitics, distant wars, macro-economic trends, politics above the micro-local level, and so on. Once we stop paying attention to everything we don’t...

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn’t about central bank bailouts, it’s about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems. The vapid discussions about “soft” or “hard” landings for the economy are akin to asking if the Titanic’sencounter with the iceberg was “soft” or “hard:” either way, the ship was doomed, just as the global economy is doomed by The New Normal of Death Spirals and Speculative Frenzies. Death Spirals are the...

Our reliance on the endless expansion of credit, leverage and credit-asset bubbles will have its own high cost. The Great Moderation of low inflation and soaring assets has ended. Welcome to the death by a thousand cuts of stagflation. It was all so easy in the good old days of the past 25 years: just keep pushing interest rates lower to reduce the cost of borrowing and juice credit expansion ((financialization) and offshore industrial production to low-cost nations...

Should the wealth effect reverse as assets fall, capital gains evaporate and investment income declines, the top 10% will no longer have the means or appetite to spend so freely. Soaring wealth-income inequality has all sorts of consequences. As many (including me) have noted, the concentration of wealth and income in the top 0.1% has enabled the few to buy political influence to protect their interests at the expense of the many and the common good. In other...

The second essential step is to recognize how the spectacles of “news” and entertainment distract our attention from this erosion of basic rights. Hierarchical power structures like city-states arose as problem-solving solutions, not just for the elites who benefited from the concentration of wealth and power but for the citizenry. This dynamic underpins the analysis presented in my recent book Global Crisis, National Renewal: when nation-states and global...

If the Fed succeeding is a “Black Swan,” bring it on. What if the “Black Swan” of 2023 is the Federal Reserve succeeds? Two stipulations here: 1. “Black Swan” is in quotes because the common usage has widened to include events that don’t match Nassim Taleb’s original criteria / definition of black swan; the term now includes events considered unlikely or that are off the radar screens of both the media and the alt-media. 2. The definition of “Fed success” is not as...

This dynamic–making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era–receives little attention or understanding. Eras may last decades, and only those who’ve lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981. The era of digital /...

If the consensus of experts misunderstand money, credit and prosperity, how are we going to advance? Describing all the ways experts got it wrong is a thriving cottage industry. Expertise is itself contentious, as conventional expertise legitimized by credentials, prestigious institutional positions, scholarship, prizes, etc. can be wielded to promote the interests of the expert or whomever is funding the expert. Another segment of experts are self-proclaimed,...