Sep 21 – Well-known author and economic commentator, Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com, explains the “optimization problem” facing policymakers and why this inevitably leads to some form of economic self-destruction...
Numbers like gross domestic product (GDP) and the unemployment rate no longer provide insight into how our economy works. As the status quo narratives and metrics lose their explanatory value, defenders of the status quo frantically...
Now that the US is a neoliberal selfie society, we have the worst of all possible worlds in terms of a failed, doomed democracy. Each individual's liberty to do whatever you want, be whatever you want, go wherever you want, etc.
How did Byzantium endure for 1,000 years after the fall of Rome? One of my reading projects over the past year is to learn more about empires:how they are established, why they endure and why they crumble. To this end, I've recently...
Based on this analytic structure, Trump may not just win the election in November--he might win by a landslide. If we believe the mainstream media and the Establishment it protects and promotes, Trump has no chance of winning the...
The possibility that Japan might launch helicopter money stimulus sent global stock markets soaring in a paroxysm of pleasurable anticipation. But exactly what is helicopter money and what connection does it have to stock valuations, if any?
This process of withdrawal into the relative safety of internally cohesive groups and group identities is intrinsically messy in globalized, multicultural societies. A great many narratives are drifting around the Brexit pool: a return to sovereignty...
My contacts in Venezuela tell me that merely posting the black market exchange rate of bolivars to USD can get you arrested. So yes, Venezuela's regime has gone full Orwell-1984: whatever is true is outlawed.
Bernanke blew it big-time, letting the "recovery" run seven years without any significant increase in rates. It is now painfully obvious that Ben Bernanke blew it big-time by not raising rates three years ago when the economy and...
Flexible labor is the future for the basic reason that it is the only viable model going forward. If we can't go forward, then let's go back: this is the guiding philosophy of the labor movement that seeks security via strict work rules.
There are limits on what the Fed can do when this bubble bursts, as it inevitably will, as surely as night follows day. It's no secret that virtually every pension fund is a dead man walking, doomed by central banks' imposition of low yields on...
Japan has proven that decay can be stretched into decades, but it has yet to prove that gravity can be revoked by central bank monetary games. Japan's fiscal and monetary extremes are in the news again: this time, it's the Bank...
It's widely accepted that most tech startups will fail. Perhaps the core business proposition didn't pan out, or the execution was flawed, or the initial success
The stark truth is nobody wants yuan any more. The US dollar (USD) has gained over 35% against major currencies since 2011. China's government has pegged its currency, the yuan (renminbi) to the USD for many years. Until mid-2005...
What NIRP communicates is: this sucker's going down, so sell everything and hoard your cash and precious metals. The last hurrah of central banks is the negative interest rate policy—NIRP. The basic idea of NIRP is to punish savers so severely...
What the central banks cannot do is create productive places to invest the credit they've generated in such excess, or force qualified borrowers to swallow more unproductive debt. One way to lose a war is to focus on preparing to fight the last war.
We want this time to be different so badly, we can almost taste it. If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepit low-rise building in the city has been razed and...
All the phantom wealth piled up in China's boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets. The 1979 film The China Syndrome took its name from the darkly humorous notion that a nuclear reactor meltdown in the US would burn straight...
Combine this regulatory burden with the decline of entrepreneurship, and you get a bubbling brew that is toxic to self-employment/small business. Why has the percentage of the population that's in the work force declined so dramatically? It's a question many have asked, and Gordon T. Long and...
Nov 12 – In his latest must-read book, Charles Hugh Smith tackles very large and hotly debated subjects with ease while drawing on a wealth of information packaged in his usual concise and colorful style (his example of the Jelly Bean Economy as...
