Charles Hugh Smith's Contributions

Imagine a ship with 100 passengers and crew drifting down a river that eventually cascades over a 1,000 foot waterfall. It's easy to plot the ship's course and the waterfall ahead. You might think 100% of those onboard would agree that something drastic must be done to either reverse course or abandon ship, but...

The incentives to take on debt are so ubiquitous that we underestimate their pernicious power to trigger self-destructive behavior. Want to go to college? Just borrow the money now, with no payments until you graduate.

At this moment, the news media is constantly clamoring about the "Three Ds" that are buffeting the markets: debt, deleveraging, and deflation. We intuitively sense that they're linked -- but how, exactly?

When the real problems are masked with fake "solutions," the chickens eventually come home to roost, and we wake up to the reality that the fake "solutions" have only made things much worse.

To fully understand the Eurozone's financial-debt crisis, we must dig through the artifice, obfuscation and propaganda to the real dynamics of Europe's "new feudalism," the Neocolonial-Financialization Model.

All models of non-linear complex systems are crude because they attempt to model millions of interactions with a handful of variables. When it comes to global weather or global markets, our ability to predict non-linear complex systems with what amounts to mathematical tricks (algorithms, etc.) is proscribed by the fundamental limits of the tricks.

What we have is a system where the full-time worker to beneficiary is already 1-to-1 and the system pays out 10 times more per person than it collects in taxes. The Medicare system would need about 10 workers for every beneficiary to be sustainable.

Most informed people are familiar with the concept of Peak Oil, but fewer are aware that we’re also entering the era of Peak Government. The central misconception of Peak Oil -- that it’s not about “running out of oil,” it’s about...

It's comforting to think "I can't do anything to resist the Central State and its financial Plutocracy," but it's not true. There are many of acts of resistance you can pursue in your daily life; here are 12 perfectly legal ones.

Modern investing offers the promise that investors who "do their homework" and use data more intelligently than the herd can gain a valuable edge. But what if the underlying data available to the investing public is fundamentally flawed?

It's very simple: either we have due process and everyone is equal under the law, or we have an authoritarian regime that is only nominally democratic for PR purposes.

Theft has been "legalized" for governments and banks in America. Every once in a while an event crystallizes the stark reality behind the lacy curtain of propaganda and artifice. Here is one such event.

I want to praise horrendously costly lessons, as those are the only ones we really learn from. We hype the value of "book learning" and give lip-service to "learning from others," but in real life we really only learn the truly valuable lessons from painful defeats and costly losses.

As food for thought, here are two charts, courtesy of frequent contributor B.C., that suggest the good news might not only be priced in, but it might abruptly cease flowing. If the market rolls over here, the next bottom might be a lot lower than most players think possible.

As long as risk is being masked or transferred to others who don't reap the gain, they only reap the losses, then the system is doomed to self-reinforcing instability and eventual collapse.

The equities market is acting like we know Greece's default will be orderly and no threat to financial stability. It is also acting like we know the U.S. economy can grow smartly while Europe contracts in recession. Lastly, the high level of confidence exuded by market participants suggests we know central bank liquidity is endlessly supportive of equities.

The economy will expand if you believe it is expanding--because you'll be "animal spirited" into buying a lot of stuff on credit that you can't afford. It all boils down to perception--that's the insight at the heart of the Grand Game of Perception Management.

It's not just gasoline consumption that's declining — petroleum and electricity consumption are also dropping. Is that indicative of economic growth?

The self-interest of the alcoholic is to keep drinking. Is this truly in his best interests? The answer illuminates the pathology of power in America.

Is it any wonder that the market for derivatives has grown another 100 trillion over the last two years? “We’ll concoct value and you’ll pay us real money for it? Of course we are going to keep doing it! Why not another 100 trillion!”