Home » Posts tagged 'charles hugh smith' (Page 10)
Tag Archives: charles hugh smith
The Art of Survival, Taoism and the Warring States
The Art of Survival, Taoism and the Warring States
Longtime correspondent Paul B. suggested I re-publish three essays that have renewed relevance. This is the first essay, from June 2008. Thank you, Paul, for the suggestion.
I’m not trying to be difficult, but I can’t help cutting against the grain on topics like surviving the coming bad times when my experience runs counter to the standard received wisdom.
A common thread within most discussions of surviving bad times–especially really bad times–runs more or less like this: stockpile a bunch of canned/dried food and other valuable accoutrements of civilized life (generators, tools, canned goods, firearms, etc.) in a remote area far from urban centers, and then wait out the bad times, all the while protecting your stash with an array of weaponry and technology (night vision binocs, etc.)
Now while I respect and admire the goal, I must respectfully disagree with just about every assumption behind this strategy. Once again, this isn’t because I enjoy being ornery (please don’t check on that with my wife) but because everything in this strategy runs counter to my own experience in rural, remote settings.
You see, when I was a young teen my family lived in the mountains. To the urban sophisticates who came up as tourists, we were “hicks” (or worse), and to us they were “flatlanders” (derisive snort).
Now the first thing you have to realize is that we know the flatlanders, but they don’t know us. They come up to their cabin, and since we live here year round, we soon recognize their vehicles and know about how often they come up, what they look like, if they own a boat, how many in their family, and just about everything else which can be learned by simple observation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why Assets Will Crash
Why Assets Will Crash
This is how it happens that boats that were once worth tens of thousands of dollars are set adrift by owners who can no longer afford to pay slip fees.
The increasing concentration of the ownership of wealth/assets in the top 10% has an under-appreciated consequence: when only the top 10% can afford to buy assets, that unleashes an almost karmic payback for the narrowing of ownership, a.k.a. soaring wealth and income inequality: assets crash.
Most of you are aware that the bottom 90% own very little other than their labor (tradeable only in full employment) and modest amounts of home equity that are highly vulnerable to a collapse of the housing bubble. (The same can be said of China’s middle class, only more so, as 75% of China’s household wealth is in real estate, more than double the percentage of wealth held in housing in U.S. households.)
As the chart illustrates, the top 10% own 84% of all stocks, over 90% of all business equity and over 80% of all non-home real estate. The concentration of ownership of assets such as vintage autos, collectibles, art, pleasure craft and second homes in the top 10% is likely even greater.
The more expensive the asset, the greater the concentration of ownership, as the top 5% own roughly 2/3 of all wealth, the top 1% own 40% and the top 0.1% own 20%. In other words, the more costly the asset, the narrower the ownership. (Total number of US households is about 128 million, so the top 5% is around 6 million households and the top 1% is 1.2 million households.)
This means the pool of potential buyers is relatively small, even if we include global wealth owners.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Pandemic Is Deepening America’s Many Divides
The Pandemic Is Deepening America’s Many Divides
And so we’ve reached the precarious state of disunion in which the only thing the warring elites can agree upon is that the Federal Reserve should rescue their private wealth, regardless of cost or consequences.
America’s divides are proliferating and deepening by the day. The key political and economic divides predate the pandemic, but the pandemic is acting as a catalyst, creating new divides and exacerbating existing ones.
Let’s start with the politicization and subsequent polarization of re-opening the economy. In a reasonably sane, coherent society, this issue would be subject to common sense debates about risks, trade-offs, policies, responses to new data, etc.
But American society is neither sane nor coherent, so what should be a non-partisan debate was immediately politicized, to the absurd extreme that “progressives” must favor continuing strict lockdowns lest they be accused of being “conservative.”
The erosion of middle ground and the disappearance of de-politicized policy debates is a clear sign that a society is doomed to disintegration not just of the social order but the political and economic orders.
Author Peter Turchin has described the disintegrative stage in his book Ages of Discord, in which he modeled a Political Stress Index comprised in part of these three dynamics:
1. Stagnating real wages due to oversupply of labor.
2. Overproduction of parasitic elites.
3.Deterioration of central state finances.
The pandemic has catalyzed the oversupply of labor and the deterioration of central state finances, and illuminated America’s vast overproduction of parasitic elites, most of whom feed off various cartels and monopolies or the financial system, which has been saved yet again from gravity by the super-wealthy’s most important protector, the Federal Reserve.
The pandemic has created new divides that highlight existing extremes of inequality. Those Americans in poor health and in jobs that cannot be performed at home are at greater risk than healthy Americans who can work at home.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
No, This Is Not Another 1929, 1973, 1987, 2000, or 2008
No, This Is Not Another 1929, 1973, 1987, 2000, or 2008
Basing one’s decisions on analogs from the past is entering a fool’s paradise of folly.
Like addicts who cannot control their cravings, financial analysts cannot stop themselves from seeking some analog situation in the past which will clarify the swirling chaos in their crystal balls. So we’ve been swamped with charts overlaying recent stock market action over 1929, 1987,2000 and 2008–though the closest analogy is actually the Oil Shock of 1973, an exogenous shock to a weakening, fragile economy.
But the reality is there is no analogous situation in the past to the present, and so all the predictions based on past performance will be misleading. The chartists and analysts claim that all markets act on the same patterns, which are reflections of human nature, and so seeking correlations of volatility and valuation that “worked” in the past will work in 2020.
Does anyone really believe the correlations of the past decade or two are high-probability predictors of the future as the entire brittle construct of fictional capital and extremes of globalization and financialization all unravel at once?
Here are a few of the many consequential differences between all previous recessions and the current situation:
1. Households have never been so dependent on debt as a substitute for stagnating wages.
2. Real earnings (adjusted for inflation) have never been so stagnant for the bottom 90% for so long.
3. Corporations have never been so dependent on debt (selling bonds or taking on loans) to fund money-losing operations (see Netflix) or stock buybacks designed to saddle the company with debt service expenses to enrich insiders.
4. The stock market has never been so dependent on what amounts to fraud–stock buybacks–to push valuations higher.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Overcapacity / Oversupply Everywhere: Massive Deflation Ahead
Overcapacity / Oversupply Everywhere: Massive Deflation Ahead
The price of a great many assets will crash, out of proportion to the decline in demand.
Oil is the poster child of the forces driving massive deflation: overcapacity / oversupply and a collapse in demand. Overcapacity / oversupply and a collapse in demand are not limited to the crude oil market; rather, they are the dominant realities in the global economy.
Yes, there are shortages in a few high-demand areas such as PPE (personal protective equipment), but across the entire spectrum of global supply and demand, there is nothing but a vast sea of overcapacity / oversupply and a systemic decline in demand as far as the eye can see.
Here’s a partial list of commodities that are in Overcapacity / oversupply:
1. Overvalued assets
2. Overpriced income streams (as income craters, so will the asset generating the income)
3. Labor: low-skill everywhere, high-skill in sectors experiencing systemic collapse in demand
4. AirBnB and other vacation rental properties
5. Overpriced flats, condos and houses
6. Overpriced rental apartments
7. Overpriced commercial office space
8. Overpriced retail space
9. Overpriced used vehicles
10. Overpriced collectibles
I think you get the idea.
Should China restart its export factories, then almost everything being manufactured will immediately be in oversupply, as the global export sector was plagued with mass overcapacity long before the Covid-19 pandemic crushed demand.
Incomes will crater as revenues and profits crash, small businesses close their doors, never to re-open, local governments tighten spending, and whatever competition still exists will relentlessly push the price of labor, goods and services lower.
Globalization has generated hyper-specialization in local and regional economies, stripping them of resilience. Fully exposed to the demand flows of a globalized class of consumers with surplus discretionary income, regions specialized in tourism, manufacturing, commodity mining, etc.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The World Has Changed More Than We Know
The World Has Changed More Than We Know
Put another way: eras end.
While the mainstream media understandably focuses on the here and now of the pandemic, some commentators are looking at the long-term consequences. Here is a small sampling:
Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shiftCoronavirus Will Require Us to Completely Reshape the EconomyFlorence Hit by the Coronavirus: The Curse of Hyperspecialization
We’re not going back to normal: Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever (MIT Technology Review)While each of these essays offers a different perspective, let’s focus on the last two: Ugo Bardi’s essay on Hyperspecialization and the technological responses described in the MIT Technology Review essay.
As readers of the blog know, I’ve been differentiating between first-order and second-order effects: First order effects: every action has a consequence. Second order effects: every consequence has its own consequences.
We can think of these as direct (first order) and indirect (second order) effects.
The MIT Technology Review article focuses on direct effects, i.e. how to deploy technology to identify people with the virus, track their recent movements and who they might have exposed to the disease, tech-driven regulations that would limit the movements of infected (such as we see in China now), etc.
Bardi’s first-hand account from Northern Italy touches on an indirect effect: the profoundly negative impact of a hyperspecialized economy that is suddenly disrupted. In this case, the specialization is tourism, but there are other examples, many driven by hyper-globalization.
Specialization has long been central to capitalism’s relentless drive to increase efficiencies and thus profits, and globalization has pushed specialization to extremes globally dominant corporations can arbitrage currencies, wages, political corruption and lax environmental standards in ways that localized competitors cannot.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Comes Next?
What Comes Next?
Predicting life after coronavirus
If covid-19 is indeed hastening the permanent disruption of the status quo, what will life in a post-coronavirus world look like?
In a prognosticating session building on last week’s Economic Shockwaves roundtable, John Rubino, Charles Hugh Smith and I — also joined by Chris Martenson this time — discuss the myriad ways in the future may be permanently altered by the disruptions happening right now.
How will the economy, fiat currencies, jobs & the nature of work, as well as our general lifestyle, be forced to evolve? What new solutions will be required and what shape with they take?
All this and more is addressed in this video (1-hour runtime):
These roundtables are always a good time as John, Charles, Chris and I not only enjoy each other’s company, but we find helpful value in tapping each other’s thinking. The process always creates even more questions that we want to ask one another.
After shooting this video, the group agreed that fertile future territory includes the housing market, retirement/pensions, which big cartels are most vulnerable to today’s disruption (e.g., education, health care, pharma, finance) and what benefits would emerge from breaking their industry strangleholds.
So, if you’d like to see this brain trust convene again to push deeper into this material, let us know in the Comments section below, along with any other specific topics you’d like for us to kick around.
Oh, and if you’d like to inspire your own discussions on resilience with those in your community, pick up your own RESILIENCE shirt here and join Chris and me in wearing it proudly 🙂
