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,…
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,…
By Charles Hugh Smith If this is what passes for competence while we cheerlead “the Roaring 20s”, then our delusion has reached “what looks like…
By Charles Hugh Smith One of the lesser known manifestations of the inflationary crisis in early-1920s Germany was rampant wage inflation. Bourgeois burghers complained bitterly…
By Charles Hugh Smith We seem to have entered a world of anti-leisure and anti-productivity in which the unpaid “shadow work” demanded to keep all…
By Charles Hugh Smith Maybe we should rephrase the slogan to “you’ll appear to own things you don’t actually control and be happy.” The World…
By Charles Hugh Smith The net result is America’s working class is up against the wall, maxed out. Let’s start by defining the working class…
By Charles Hugh Smith What Kafka got right is how societies can become busily dysfunctional. For self-evident reasons, the fictional visions of Orwell and Huxley…
By Charles Hugh Smith The financial analysts gloating over the prospect of higher corporate profits resulting from firing workers overlook the collapse of customer satisfaction,…
By Charles Hugh Smith Politicians and corporate managers have an enviable record of self-enrichment but very little to show in terms of putting the long-term…
By Charles Hugh Smith Speculation has its own expiration dynamics, and they don’t depend on us recognizing speculative excess for what it is. They will…
By Charles Hugh Smith This is not to suggest living/working overseas is a panacea or easy–it isn’t. There is an inescapable irony in The American…
By Charles Hugh Smith What’s no longer affordable is eventually jettisoned, including high-rent homes and apartments. Recency bias can stretch back 40 years. It’s been…
By Charles Hugh Smith Can an economy in which 10% of the households qualify as middle class claim to offer widespread opportunities for secure prosperity?…
By Charles Hugh Smith As in the Gulag it replicates, the innocent are swept up with the guilty in a disconcertingly unjust ratio. The human…