Tag Archives: The United States

Why am I hopeful? the Status Quo is devolving, and a better way of living lies just beyond the corrupt, wasteful, ruinous consumerist debt/financial tyranny we now inhabit. Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn’t leave much...

Not only will Fed policy not fix what’s broken, it will actively make the structural problems worse. Yesterday I described the conditions that render the U.S. ungovernable. Here is a chart of why the U.S. economy will also be ungovernable. Longtime readers are acquainted with the S-curve model of expansion, maturity, stagnation and decline. This is why the economy will be ungovernable: all the financial gambits that...

A variety of forces will disrupt or obsolete existing modes of production and the social order. Though no one can foretell the future, it is self-evident that the status quo—dependent as it is on cheap oil and fast-expanding debt—is unsustainable. So what will trigger the collapse of the status quo, and what lies beyond when the current arrangements break down?  Can we predict how-when-where with any accuracy? All...

Charles Hugh Smith combines the best graphs on the declining wage share of GDP in this post. He answers the question if the tax cuts and more federal borrowing and spending can solve what is broken in the U.S. economy. Solutions abound, but not within our centralized state-cartel neofeudal system. Not to rain on the new administration’s parade, but one question needs to be asked of any new administration: will tax...

Combine financialization, neoliberalism and moral bankruptcy, and you end up with self-serving parasitic elites. When did our financial and political elites become self-serving parasites? Some will answer that elites have always been self-serving parasites; as tempting as it may be to offer a blanket denunciation of elites, this overlooks the eras in which elites rose to meet existential crises. Following in Ancient...

The “fake news” is that we’ve never been healthier, healthcare costs are under control and our economy has fully “recovered.” We’ve heard a lot about “fake news” from those whose master narratives are threatened by alternative sources and analyses. We’ve heard less about the master narratives being threatened: the fomenting of mass hysteria, which turns the populace into an easily manipulated and managed herd,...

If we had to guess which areas will likely experience the smallest declines in prices and recover the soonest, which markets would you bet on? Though housing statistics such as average sales price are typically lumped into one national number, this is extremely misleading: there are two completely different housing markets in the U.S. One is hot, one is not so hot. Just as importantly, one may stay relatively hot while...

I resolve to acquire skills, not credentials. Here’s a grab-bag of resolutions with something for just about every persuasion. 1. I resolve to never utter or write the word “Trump” in 2017. (Good luck with that…) 2. Having watched bitcoin rise from $250 (or perhaps from $25 or even 25 cents) to $900+, I resolve to finally buy some bitcoin before it soars over $1,000. (Please file under “this is intended as bemused...

People were poor by today’s standards, so why do people remember the plantation life fondly? The answer is simple: community, purpose, sacrifice and meaning. Allow me to connect two apparently unconnected dots. Dot #1: The last sugar plantation in Hawaii is closing down, ending more than a century of plantation life in the 50th state. Dot #2: a new study found that Nearly 95% of all new jobs during Obama era were...

It will be the middle class that accepted the notion that “real estate is the foundation of family wealth” that will be stripmined by higher taxes on immobile assets such as real estate. Correspondent Joel M. submitted an article that struck me as a harbinger of the future: In Greece, Property Is Debt: “At law courts throughout Greece, people are lining up to file papers renouncing their inheritance. Not necessarily...