Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

. Come on, Jay, you can always goose stocks back to new highs after the election. Indulge me for a moment in some backroom speculation. It’s absurdly obvious that the unelected, permanent, ever-expanding National Security State, a.k.a the Deep State, and its Democratic Party allies have been attempting to torpedo Donald Trump since the 2016 election took them by surprise. (Imagine doing everything that worked so well in the past and failing at the last minute. Ouch....

The global crisis is not merely economic; it is the result of profound financial, sociological and political trends described by Marx, Kafka, Orwell and Huxley. The unfolding global crisis is best understood as the convergence of the dynamics described by Marx, Kafka, Orwell and Huxley. Let’s start with Franz Kafka, the writer (1883-1924) who most eloquently captured the systemic injustices of all-powerful bureaucratic institutions–the alienation experienced by the...

The bill for extreme wealth/income inequality is now overdue, and the penalties for ignoring the bill will be as extreme as the inequality. Our socio-economic-political system–let’s call it the status quo–has been hollowed out by extremes of wealth/power inequality driven by financialization and globalization, which have enriched the top 5% and left everyone else behind. As a result, the status quo has become increasingly fragile and brittle even as cheerleaders...

That which has failed is unsustainable, no matter how many trillions the Federal Reserve tosses against the tides of history. The Gulfs Between the Classes The Credibility Gap The Partnerships That Failed The Groups That Opted Out The Undermining of Effort Every one of these is a manifestation of institutional failure. The Gulfs Between the Classes (see chart of soaring inequality below) manifests a completely broken economic and social order, and the abject...

As the old models break down, opportunities for new models will arise. Unstable, unsustainable systems can lull observers into a comfy complacency as instability increases beneath a thin veneer of apparent stability. That’s the systemic story of the past 20 years: all the extremes that were needed to maintain the veneer of stability have increased the instability building beneath the complacent confidence. But sadly for the status quo, all bubbles pop, all...

Our ruling elites, devoid of leadership, are little more than the scum of self-interested, greedy grifters who rose to the top of America’s foul-smelling stew of corruption. The Founding Fathers were wary of institutional threats to liberty and the citizenry’s sovereignty, which included centralized concentrations of power (monarchy, central banks, federal agencies, etc.) and the tyranny of corruption unleashed by small-minded, self-interested, greedy grifters who...

Flooding the financial system with “free money” only restores the illusion of stability I updated my How Systems Collapse graphic from 2018 with a “we are here” line to indicate our current precarious position just before the waterfall: For those who would argue we’re nowhere near collapse, consider that over 20% of the Federal Reserve’s $2 trillion spew of free money went directly into the pockets of America’s billionaires: $434 billion by the latest estimates,...

The fragile ice shelf of speculative bets and debt clinging to the mountainside is making strange creaking sounds– will you listen or will you ignore it because ‘the Fed has our back’? Feast your eyes on the chart below of the Nasdaq 100 stock market Index, which is dominated by the six FAAMNG (rhymes with “famine”) stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Google which now account for over 20% of the entire U.S. stock market’s capitalization. Notice...

Re-opening a fragile, brittle, bankrupt, hopelessly perverse and corrupt “normal” won’t fix what’s broken. The stock market is in a frenzy of euphoria at the re-opening of the economy. Too bad the re-opening won’t fix what’s broken. As I’ve been noting recently, the real problem is the systemic fragility of the U.S. economy, which has lurched from one new extreme to the next to maintain a thin, brittle veneer of normalcy. Fragile economies cannot survive any impact...

Dear Corporate America: maybe you remember the old Johnny Paycheck tune? Let me refresh your memory: take this job and shove it. Put yourself in the shoes of a single parent waiting tables in a working-class cafe with lousy tips, a worker stuck with high rent and a soul-deadening commute–one of the tens of millions of America’s working poor who have seen their wages stagnate and their income becoming increasingly precarious / uncertain while the cost of living has...