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…
Charles Hugh Smith
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,…
Our Crisis of Competence
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…
The $150,000 Housekeeper: Wage Inflation Kicks Into Second Gear
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…
Is Anyone Else’s Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital “Shadow Work” as Mine Is?
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…
Maybe We’re Closer to “You’ll Own Nothing” Than We Realize
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…
Squeezed for Decades, America’s Working Class Is Finally Up Against the Wall
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…
What Orwell and Huxley Got Wrong and Kafka Got Right
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…
If AI Is So Great, Why Is Managing the Digital Realm Eating Us Alive?
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,…
How to Navigate Our Low-Trust, Increasingly Dysfunctional Society and Economy
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…
The Fed’s Empire of Speculation and the Echoes of 1929
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…
Irony Alert: The American Dream Is Only Affordable Overseas
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…
What Happens When Millions of Renters Can No Longer Afford High Rents and Move Back Home?
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…