Charles Hugh Smith's Contributions

A simple 8-point plan would restore both the banking and the real estate sectors, and end the political dominance of the parasitic "too big to fail" banks.

Four charts cast a skeptical light on the Status Quo "stories" of endlessly rising equities and the doomed dollar.

The reasons why small businesses aren't hiring are structural; the dearth of jobs is not temporary, and this is not a "soft patch," it is quicksand. The low job growth in the U.S. isn't a "soft patch," it's a sea of quicksand.

The government's promises, for pensions and healthcare and everything else, cannot be kept. We as a nation will eventually have to have a truthful conversation about that reality.

Here's a thought: let's buy our Congress back from the special interests who now own it. We all know special interests own the U.S. Congress and the Federal machinery of governance (i.e. regulatory capture).

Strip away the bailouts and the bogus austerity plans, and the truth is revealed: Greece is a kleptocracy, and the banks and the ECB Eurocrats are both complicit.

Papering over the structural imbalances in the Eurozone with endless bailouts will not resolve the fundamental asymmetries.

Add rising interest payments and higher taxes to declining assets and incomes and you don't get "growth," you get insolvency.

The Soviet Union seemed permanently powerful in 1979. Ten years later it collapsed. Is 2011 this era's 1979?

Despite their many differences, the economies of China and the U.S. share a number of key traits:both are corrupt, rigged, crony-Capitalist, rely on phony statistics and propaganda and operate with two sets of rules: one for the Elites, and another for the masses.

Manipulation is the beating heart of Federal Reserve and Central State policies.The centrally planned economy has failed to respond as expected, and so the response is to put more cocaine-laced pellets in the feedbox and encourage the poor starved rat inside the cage to press the bar labeled "debt" to get another pellet of addiction and highly profitable enslavement.

The financialization of education, the coming implosion of State revenues, the indentured serfdom of "student loans" and the "end of work" era will enable a revolution within higher education.

There is so much ideological, quasi-religious fanaticism around "free trade" (there is no such thing as "free trade," there are only various permutations of managed trade)and "industrial policy" (every nation has one, explicit or implicit) that it is difficult to make any sense of the many intertwined issues.

The Federal Government borrowed and spent $5.1 trillion to get $700 billion in total GDP "growth" from 2008-2011. In constant dollars, there was no growth at all.

Everybody wants solutions. Here's the first step to any real solution: pin down exactly where all the money is going. Only when you know the true, full costs in any system, and have a system of accountability that aligns with the cost structrure, can any real solutions emerge.

My basic point of view is that nominal prices and broad terms such as deflation, inflation and growth should be viewed with extreme skepticism. The more useful approach is to examine the purchasing power of various assets

Correspondent E.M. responded to $6.5 Trillion Lost, One House at a Time with this succinct account of housing's role in declining household wealth.E.M. is not a realtor or in a housing-related profession; his report on housing valuations in the Atlanta area is that of a knowledgeable observer and does not claim to be a complete statistical survey.

The $6.5 trillion lost in the bursting of the housing bubble is not a "paper loss," it is tragically real. Is anyone surprised that housing continues to slide? According to this report, Home Market Takes a Tumble: Turnaround More Distant After 3% Drop, Steepest Quarterly Decline Since 2008, housing has declined in value for 57 straight months, almost 5 years.

The Federal Reserve and the Federal government are both desperately attempting to "manage perceptions" of the bogus "recovery" and of their own legitimacy. Can "managed perceptions" replace reality?

Without speculating on where housing valuations "should" be, what's your takeaway from these charts of individual home prices? Does this look like a "recovery" to you? Since everyone knows "real estate is local," I selected three homes in very desirable but not overly exclusive neighborhoods with excellent school districts and a history of strong price appreciation: two in Northern California and one in the Greater Boston region.