The Core Skill Going Forward: Frugality
By Charles Hugh Smith Speaking of lean years, it took the NASDAQ stock market index almost 17 years to recover its March 2000 high of…
Charles Hugh Smith
All Three Pillars Holding Up the Economy Have Cracked
By Charles Hugh Smith All three pillars propping up workforce spending are cracking. Plan accordingly. Karl Marx and Henry Ford both understood the key pillar…
Anti-Progress, Breakdown, Reset
By Charles Hugh Smith The indicators of breakdown and collapse are all around us, but we don’t dare name them because then they’d become a…
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…
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…