Tag Archives: 5.) Charles Hugh Smith

When bubbles pop, it’s natural selection at its most unforgiving: “adapt or die,” and those who ignore or discount consequential asymmetries will have a very difficult time navigating the triage. After years of relative stability, it seems asymmetries, distortions and denial are playing out in unexpectedly destabilizing ways. These complex and often opaque dynamics are interacting with each other and reinforcing each other in difficult to predict ways. No wonder...

Liberation in the real world is the result of self-reliance and investing in our own well-being. Liberation has many contexts. It can mean being freed from imprisonment or servitude, freedom from gnawing want or oppression, or being liberated from prisons of the mind. Note that the first form of liberation is external / material, the second is internal / psychological / spiritual. Many confuse the two, blaming an oppressive system for their unhappiness rather than...

Everyone caught by surprise that the infinite road actually has an end will face a bewildering transition. The End of the “Growth” Road is upon us, though the consensus continues to hold fast to the endearing fantasy of infinite expansion of consumption. This fantasy has been supported for decades by the financial expansion of debt, which enabled more spending which pushed consumption, earnings, taxes, etc. higher. All the financial games are fun but “growth” boils...

So-called “cosmetic work” can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now that housing is finally rolling over due to rising mortgage rates and bubble valuations, many of those who have been priced out of the market are hoping to take advantage of lower prices. In many cases, the most affordable segment is fixer-uppers, homes that are distressed for any number of reasons: a lack of maintenance; construction or drainage deficiencies; obsolete or defective foundations,...

In effect, authorities created two rat farms, both unintended: the sewers, and the private-sector rat-farms. The history of Rat Farms offers a valuable lesson in how markets and bureaucracies work. The story of how the colonial authorities in Hanoi came to establish two kinds of rat farms is highly instructive. The first rat farm was unintentional. French colonial authorities decided to modernize the French Quarter of Hanoi (where Westerners lived) by constructing a...

What nobody yet knows (or the few insiders who do know are keeping to themselves) is what will matter. Being a doom-and-gloom Bear stops being fun when the Bear Bar gets crowded. When everyone has moved to our side of the boat, the grizzled Bears get nervous, especially when they peer over at the Bull side of the boat and see a handful of dispirited Bulls ignoring the guy yelling at the bartender to “back up the truck.” The problem old-timers see is what everyone...

Trying to restore a system that is spiraling away from equilibrium with new extremes of obsolete, misguided policies only accelerates the swings from apparent stability to cascading chaos. The conventional view of the market is there are two sides to every trade and one is right and the other is wrong.The punters who correctly read the tea leaves and who were right scored gains on their trade and those punters whose forecast was wrong lost their bet. But what if...

Everything's fixed except what's no longer profitable to plunder. Underfunded, ignored, mismanaged by incompetents, it breaks. Everything's fixed--except what's broken. Hmm. Maybe we need to read that again. Everything's fixed means it's been "fixed" like a game or match has been fixed--rigged to benefit insiders while the unwary onlookers and punters have been led to believe that it's "fair and open." That con job is the critical cover to...

The unraveling of hyper-Globalization and hyper-Financialization will generate consequences few conventional analysts and pundits anticipate. TikTok videos on ‘Quiet Quitting’–doing the minimum at work, giving nothing extra to the employer– have gone viral, and The Wall Street Journal quickly picked up the thread: If Your Co-Workers Are ‘Quiet Quitting,’ Here’s What That MeansSome Gen Z professionals are saying no to hustle culture; ‘I’m not going to go extra.’ The...

If those on the opposite side of the trade are viewed as threats rather than friends, it’s time to revise the analysis. Of the many self-generated dangers investors face, few are more dangerous than confirmation bias, the comfort we experience seeking out views that confirm our own positions and our resistance to studying opposing views. Confirmation bias is both self-evident and complex. We all understand the psychologically soothing feeling when others heartily...