Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

If we set out to design a highly addictive platform that optimized the most toxic, destructive aspects of human nature, we’d eventually come up with social media. Social problems arise when initially harmless addictions explode in popularity, and economic problems arise when the long-term costs of the addictions start adding up. Political problems arise when the addictions are so immensely profitable that the companies skimming the profits can buy political influence...

Geopolitics has moved from a slow-moving, relatively predictable chess match to rapidly evolving 3-D chess in which the rules keep changing in unpredictable ways. A declining standard of living in the developed world, declining growth for the developed world and geopolitical jockeying for control of resources make for a highly combustible mix awaiting a spark: welcome to the era of intensifying chaos and the rapid advance of new weapons of conflict as ruling elites...

As our fragmentation accelerates, shared economic interests are ignored in favor of divisive warring camps that share no common interests. That our society and economy are fragmenting is self-evident. This fragmentation is accelerating rapidly, as middle ground vanishes and competing camps harden their positions to solidify the loyalty of the “tribe.” All or nothing, either-or binaries are the order of the day: you’re either 100% with us or 100% against us, you’re...

The reckoning is coming, and everyone who counted on “eternal growth of borrowing” to stave off the reckoning is in for a big surprise. We’ve used a simple trick to keep the status quo from imploding for the past 11 years: borrow whatever it takes to keep paying the skyrocketing costs for housing, healthcare, college, childcare, government, permanent wars and so on. The trick has worked because central banks pushed interest rates to zero, lowering the costs of...

Eventually the younger generations will connect all the economic injustices implicit in ‘OK Boomer’ with the Fed. Much of the cluelessness and economic inequality behind the OK Boomer meme is the result of Federal Reserve policies that have favored those who already own the assets (Boomers) that the Fed has relentlessly pumped higher, to the extreme disadvantage of younger generations who were not given the opportunity to buy assets cheap and ride the Fed wave...

Anyone who thinks this bogus “deal” has resolved any of the issues or uncertainties deserves to be fired immediately. Here’s a late-night TV parody of a trade deal: The agreement won’t be signed by both parties, though each might sign their own version of it, and the terms of the deal will never ever be revealed to the public, which includes everyone doing any business in the nations doing the “deal.” How is this “deal” not a pathetic parody of a real deal? A real...

It was all fun and games enriching the super-wealthy but now the karmic cost of the Fed’s manipulation and propaganda is about to come due. A “market” that needs $1 trillion in panic-money-printing by the Fed to stave off a karmic-overdue implosion is not a market: a legitimate market enables price discovery. What is price discovery? The decisions and actions of buyers and sellers set the price of everything: assets, goods, services, risk and the price of borrowing...

Once the contagion starts spreading, loose money won’t put the fires out. As the nation’s political and economic leaders struggled to contain the 2008 financial meltdown, President George W. Bush famously summed the situation up: “If money doesn’t loosen up, this sucker will go down.” Eleven years into the loose money recovery, this sucker is finally going down for reasons that have little to do with tight money and everything to do with the inconvenient fact...

The higher up the wealth-power pyramid the observer is, the more prone they are to a magical-thinking belief that the empire is forever, even as it is crumbling around them. How great nations and empires arise, mature, decay and collapse has long been of interest for a self-evident reason: if we can discern a template or process, we can predict when the great nations and empires of today will slide into the dustbin of history. One of the justly famous attempts to...

And how do we pay for these spiraling out of control costs? By borrowing more, of course. If we had to choose one “big picture” reason why the vast majority of households are losing ground, it would be: the costs of essentials are spiraling out of control. I’ve often covered the dynamics of stagnating income for the bottom 90%, and real-world inflation, i.e. a decline in purchasing power. But neither of these dynamics fully describes the relentless upward spiral...