Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

Given the extremes of the stock market’s frauds and even greater extremes of wealth/income inequality it has created, tell me again why the stock market will still exist in 2024? When I read a financial pundit predicting a bull market in stocks through 2024, blah-blah-blah, I wonder: what makes you think the stock market will even exist in 2024, at least in its current form? Given the current trajectory of the real economy into the Greatest Depression while the...

The elites dancing through the minefield all have plans, but how many are prepared for the punch in the mouth? Open any newspaper from the past 100 years and you will soon find a newsworthy geopolitical hotspot or conflict. Geopolitical conflict is the default setting for humanity, it seems, but it does feel as if the minefield of geopolitical rivalries and flashpoints has been thickly sown and many of the players are dancing through the minefield with a worrisomely...

Just as the rewards of central-bank bubbles have not been evenly distributed, the pain created by the collapse of the bubbles won’t be evenly distributed, either. We’ve reached an interesting juncture in history, and I don’t mean the pandemic. I’m referring to the normalization of extremes in the economy, in social decay and in political dysfunction and polarization. Let’s ask a very simple question. The S&P 500 stock index went up five-fold from its 2009 low...

The only realistic Plan B is a fundamental, permanent re-ordering of the cost structure of the entire U.S. economy. The fantasy of a V-shaped recovery has evaporated, and expectations for a W or L-shaped recovery are increasingly untenable. So forget V, W and L; the letters that will shape the future are N, P, B: there is No Plan B. All the hopes for a recovery were based on a quick return to the economy that existed in late 2019. All the bailouts and stimulus...

In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities. Here’s how every modern con starts: let’s look at the data. Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to look at the data because the con artist has assembled the data to grease the slides of the con. We have been indoctrinated into a new and false religion, the faith of data. We’ve been relentlessly indoctrinated with...

The last shred of power the elites hold is the belief of the masses that the elites are still in control. I understand the natural desire to believe somebody’s in charge: whether it’s the Deep State, the Chinese Communist Party, the Kremlin or Agenda 21 globalists, we’re primed to believe somebody somewhere is controlling events or pursuing agendas that drive global responses to events. I submit whatever control we discern is illusory, as the dynamics unleashed by...

They’re hoping the endless circuses and trails of bread crumbs will forever distract us from their plunder and the inequalities built into America’s financial system.. The primary story of the past 20 years is the already-rich have gotten much richer, with destabilizing economic, social and political consequences. The Federal Reserve and its army of academic / think-tank / financier apologists, lackeys, toadies, apparatchiks and sycophants have several rather thin...

Ours is a Wile E. Coyote economy, and now we’re hanging in mid-air, realizing there is nothing solid beneath our feet. The story we’re told about how our “capitalist” economy works is outdated. The story goes like this: companies produce goods and services for a competitive marketplace and earn a profit from this production. These profits are income streams for investors, who buy companies’ stocks based on these profits. As profits rise, so do stock valuations. It’s...

The Fed has backed itself not into a corner but to the edge of a precipice. Though the Federal Reserve never stated its Grand Bargain explicitly, their actions have spoken louder than their predictably self-serving, obfuscatory public pronouncements. Here’s the Grand Bargain they offered institutional investors and speculators alike: We’re taking away your low-risk, high-yield investments by slashing interest rates to near-zero, but we’re giving you endless asset...

So what do we know with any sort of certainty about the claim that “the pandemic is over”? Very little. Is the pandemic over in China, Europe, Japan and the U.S./Canada? Is the much-anticipated V-Shaped economic recovery already baked in, i.e. already gathering momentum? The consensus, as reflected by the stock market (soaring), the corporate media and governmental easings of restrictions seems to be “yes” to both questions. But science is not a consensus-based...