Charles Hugh Smith's Contributions

As things get dicier globally, assets in periphery nations typically get dumped as mobile capital flees risk and migrates to lower risk core nations and currencies.

Attending costly games is on the margins of the household budget. When the credit card gets maxed out, attending is no longer an option.

Nobody really believes the official narrative that the "recovery" is powering the remarkable strength of U.S. stocks, bonds and real estate. The real Main Street economy is quite obviously struggling, outside the energy and Federal government sectors, and so...

Which appears more likely—a straight-line extension of the past two years' rise in stocks, or another "impossible" decline to complete the megaphone pattern?

The real problem with Piketty's taxation/social welfare solution to wealth inequality is that it does nothing to change the source of systemic inequality, debt-based neofeudalism and neocolonialism.

The front door is covered with official pronouncements of "the China Dream" and blustery demands of hegemony, but the back door is choked with members of the financial/political Elite fleeing China and taking their wealth with them.

Since the SDR is just an aggregate of fiat currencies, it cannot really change the fundamentals of the current status quo.

Solving profoundly structural problems by establishing a new foundation of values that most can embrace positively is the hallmark of leadership.

The idea is intriguing on a number of levels. In terms of retaining value though thick and thin, the ultimate reserve currency cannot be printed (and thus devalued) with abandon by a government.

Doom-and-gloomers (myself included) have been wrong for four years. The financial markets continue higher, and the excesses of the status quo continue expanding with little ill effect (so far).

The global scramble for Africa's estimated 25 billion barrels of oil is on. Those scrambling to secure (and/or exploit) the continent's abundance of fossil fuels include each oil-rich nation's political and economic...

There has long been a quasi-magical belief in the U.S. that capitalism's intrinsic dynamic of creative destruction will always create more jobs than it destroys. The evidence is compelling that this belief is no longer reality-based.

Here is the politicos' government shutdown game in a nutshell: inflict maximum pain on the rest of us to score cheap points with partisans.

America's energy boom is creating consequences for the value of the dollar. As I have explained here a number of times, this goes back to Triffin's Paradox, which states that when one nation's fiat currency is used as the world's reserve currency...

An unprecedented tsunami of state-borrowed and Fed-printed money has failed to fix the systemic crisis.

Offloading risk onto the state does not make the risk vanish; it simply concentrates the risk of collapse into the state itself.

We as a nation need to prioritize the Social Security retirement of those with no other pension incomes.

Conventional Left-Right ideologies shed little light on the structural causes of inequality or systemic solutions to poverty.

Most commentators view the U.S. dollar through the prism of the domestic economy: Federal Reserve money-printing increases the supply of dollars, depreciating its value, and this policy is intended to competitively devalue the dollar to increase U.S. exports.