The Cost of Owning a Home Is Soaring
By Charles Hugh Smith The soaring costs of home ownership are changing the metrics of unaffordability in important ways. We all know that buying a…
Charles Hugh Smith
Unaffordable Housing and Homeless Encampments: How Did It Get This Bad?
By Charles Hugh Smith To reverse the damage wrought by financialization, we must reverse financialization. The post-election hope that festering problems can now be solved…
The Extremely Profitable Inner Workings of Digital Addiction
By Charles Hugh Smith Turn the crank of social media / search (SM/S) and you get highly profitable Digital Addiction and social destabilization leading to…
All The World’s a Stage: Everything Is Fake
By Charles Hugh Smith No wonder we’re restless, teetering on the edge, frustrated by our addictions to fakery and excess, starved for what cannot be…
Can We Rein In the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy?
By Charles Hugh Smith Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the…
Social Trust: It’s Not Warm and Fuzzy, It’s the Money, Honey
By Charles Hugh Smith That most of us live in a low-value, low-trust economy of shoddy goods and services hidden beneath high-tech frictionless, faceless transactions…
How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class Now?
By Charles Hugh Smith If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it straightforward for anyone willing to adopt the values and…
What’s “Free” About “Free Speech”?
By Charles Hugh Smith Without being aware of it, we’ve privatized “free” speech in the form of digital monopolies. Free speech is getting a lot…
Living Well on Less Than $30,000 a Year–One American Family’s Story
By Charles Hugh Smith “It’s all because of our low cost of living that I can feel relatively secure.” We see stories like this all…
Is It Possible to Live Well Earning $30,000 a Year in America? Yes–With These Conditions
By Charles Hugh Smith Can a couple of hardworking people live well in America on $30,000 a year in earnings? Yes, if they’re willing to…
10 Geopolitical / Financial Risks to the Global Economy
By Charles Hugh Smith Perhaps the most apt metaphor to describe the decade ahead is that investors, consumers and taxpayers will all be rafting whitewater…
The Glue Binding Democracy and a Free Economy Has Melted
By Charles Hugh Smith And that’s how democracy and a free economy die. An astute reader asked me to clarify the difference between individual sacrifice…
Prepare for the Repricing of Risk Globally
By Charles Hugh Smith The past 24 years can be viewed as an era in which risk declined due to the dynamics of globalization and…
Financial Nihilism and the Collapsing American Dream
By Charles Hugh Smith Following the conventional path is a deadend. It isn’t easy to carve a path outside the well-worn pathways of debt servitude,…