Home » Posts tagged 'Featured Voices'
Tag Archives: Featured Voices
Charles Hugh Smith: Preventing The Final Fall Of Our Democratic Republic
Charles Hugh Smith: Preventing The Final Fall Of Our Democratic Republic
There’s mounting evidence that the Age of American Exceptionalism is grinding to an end.
Demographically, in the U.S. (as well as many other developed nations), the prospects of the younger generations are substantially less than those of the Baby Boomers. The same is true socioeconomically as well; the wealth gap between the 1% and everyone else continues to accelerate.
What’s been the root cause of this slide towards greater and greater inequity? And can anything be done to reverse it?
Economist analyst and author Charles Hugh Smith addresses these core questions in his new book Pathfinding Our Destiny: Preventing The Final Fall Of Our Democratic Republic. Charles concludes that we are the terminal end of a multi-century process of centralization that is no longer working for society’s benefit:
We have a political system which is becoming increasingly tied into money. Now, people have always said, like from 100 years ago, “money is the mother’s milk of politics”. Money and power have always coalesced around political power. But in the last, say, 70 years, post-World War II, the central governments and central banks of the world have grown immensely in their centralized power.
And one of the theses I’m proposing in my book is that centralization itself in now the problem. We’ve been told for 400 years that it’s been the solution. Just centralize power and wealth into tighter and tighter control and then that will somehow solve whatever problems we have.
The intense concentration of power is becoming blatantly visible these days. Six media companies control most of the media in the U.S. It used to be six banks, but now I think it’s down to only three or four, who control most of the financial system.
Steen Jakobsen: The Four Horsemen Portend A Painful Reckoning
Steen Jakobsen: The Four Horsemen Portend A Painful Reckoning
Steen Jacobsen, Chief Economist and Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank sees economic slowdown ahead.
Specifically, his “Four Horseman” indicators: the drivers of economic growth, are all flashing red.
Jacobsen believes that the central banks will continue their liquidity tightening efforts for as long as they can get away with (i.e., until the financial markets start toppling over). In his opinion, they eased way too much for way too long; and the malinvestment and zombification that resulted needs to clear the system — and it will likely do so more violently and painful than the central banks will like:
I like to make things simple. Right now we have the Four Horsemen: the four drivers of the global economy. They are the quantity of money, which is falling; the price of money, which is rising; the price of energy,which is a tax on consumers and is rising; and globalization/productivity, which is falling.
So, if you look at the economy as a black box, I really don’t know what happens inside of it. But I can observe what goes into the black box: it’s these four things.
Globalization / productivity, we know that’s all about Trump, trade war and the likes. It’s not exactly improving; it’s actually worsening.
As for the quantity of money, a lot of people argue with me that the Central Banks are still expanding their balance sheets, but the fact of the matter is that the QT in terms of the U.S has been reducing the Federal Reserve balance sheet. And we have a stealth reduction of the balance sheet in terms of the Bank of Japan. The EBC would love to cut and is publicly committed to doing so. The Bank of England is doing its first hike. So the quantity of money is falling.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nafeez Ahmed: Our Systems Are Failing
Nafeez Ahmed: Our Systems Are Failing
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award winning 15 year investigative journalist, noted international security scholar, best-selling author and film-maker. He authored The Guardian’s Earth Insight blog and has twice won the prestigious Project Censored Award for outstanding investigative journalism.
In his new book Failing States, Collapsing Systems, Nafeez points out, as we often do here at PeakProsperity.com, that everything in our modern society is connected to energy, and that our pursuit of ever more, ever higher growth is finally colliding with planetary limits. Scarcity and strife will be the dominant trends from here, unless we, as a species, start looking for different ways of living better-suited for a finite world:
The most fascinating thing for me is how so much of what we take for granted becomes questionable as a result of the breakdown we’re seeing. When we begin questioning the exponential growth model then we begin questioning the value system driving our material production/consumption. It’s not that it hasn’t produced amazing knowledge of our environment and our place in the universe. It’s not that there haven’t been a huge amount of amazing technological developments, like the internet which has enabled people to be interconnected in ways that they never were able to before. In a way has paved the way for us to be able to think globally in a way that centuries ago would have never happened.
It’s not that everything about this paradigm is bad. It’s just that it has very clearly outlasted its usefulness and is now fundamentally responsible for escalating the biophysical rupture that we see happening and manifesting in so many different ways. What that tells me is that we have to grow up as a species. It’s an evolutionary moment.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Harry Dent: Stocks Will Fall 70-90% Within 3 Years
Harry Dent: Stocks Will Fall 70-90% Within 3 Years
Economist and cycle trend forecaster Harry Dent sees crushing deflation ahead for nearly every financial asset class. We are at the nexus of a concurrent series of downtrends in the four most important predictive trends he tracks.
Laying out the thesis of his new book The Sale Of A Lifetime, Dent sees punishing losses ahead for investors who do not position themselves for safety beforehand. On the positive side, he predicts those that do will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to buy assets at incredible bargain prices once the carnage ends (and yes, for those of you wondering, he also addresses his outlook for gold):
All four of the cycles I track point down now. One after the next has peaked in the last several years. All four point down into early 2020 or so. That’s only happened in the early to mid-’70s when we had the worst stock crashes back then, the OPEC embargo, etc — the worst set of crises since the 1930s.
Of course, in the early ’30s we had this same configuration of all four of these fundamental cycles, cycles that have taken me 30 years to hone and say “these are the four that matter”.
The next three years are likely to be the worst we see in our lifetimes. It will be more like the early 1930s when stocks hit a debt bubble and financial asset bubbles crashed, which they only do once in a lifetime such as the early 1930s. Stocks will be down 70, 80, 90% — that’s to be as expected in this stage of the cycle after such a bubble.
I went from being the most bullish economist in the ’80s and ’90s to now being of the most bearish because what goes up goes down. That’s what cycles do. At heart, I’m a cycle guy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way
New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way
Given the brutal start to the markets in the first three weeks of 2016, we thought it a good time to check in with the team at New Harbor Financial. We have had them on our podcast periodically over the past years as the market churned to ever new highs, and have always appreciated their skepticism of these liquidity-driven “”markets”” as well as their unwavering commitment to risk management should the party in stocks end suddenly.
So, how is their risk-managed approach faring now that the S&P 500 has suddenly dropped 8% since Christmas? Quite well. Their general portfolio is flat for the year so far — evidence that caution, prudence and hedging can indeed preserve capital during market downdrafts.
We’ve invited the New Harbor team back on this week to hear their latest assessment on the markets, as well as how they’re approaching their portfolio positioning moving forward:
We spend a lot of time talking about position sizing. Right now we have very little in the stock market. We never cheer for a crash in the sense that we know a lot of people would likely get harmed in such a scenario, but we also spend our time assessing reality and probability. The likelihood of probability for a crash certainly has never been non-zero, but it has developed a greater likelihood than it had even just a few weeks ago. There has been a notable sentiment change.
I’d like to point out: we’re not even a month into the year and we have already clawed back over two years’ worth of gains in the stock market. Even if you look at the S&P 500, which has been the most lofty because of its capitalization-weighted nature, where we are at right now takes us all the way back near the end of 2013.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
David Collum: The Next Recession Will Be A Barn-Burner
David Collum: The Next Recession Will Be A Barn-Burner
For those who enjoyed his encyclopedic 2015: Year In Review, this week we spend an hour with David Collum to ask: After processing through all of that information, what do you think the future is most likely to bring?
Perhaps it comes as little surprise that he sees the global economy headed back down into recession, one that will be deeper and more damaging than the 2008 crisis:
In 2008/9, while the equity markets when down, the bond markets went up. And that buffered an awful lot of pensions and 401Ks and endowments and things like that. And so people felt pain, but they didn’t realize that there was an offsetting gain. They did not notice that part as much, but I think the next downturn is going to be concurrent bond market collapse and equity collapse and there will be no slack in that downturn.
I think stocks and bonds are both at ridiculously high levels now. The bond market can only go down from here, right? I mean, it can keep going up for a while, but there is just nothing left to be squeezed out of it. Interest rates are at seven hundred-year lows, supposedly – they’re certainly at stupid lows, right. You have a third of Europe at negative rates… And so I think at some point the bond market’s got to collapse. It will start in the high yield market, and that is happening right now. Then it’ll spread, maybe treasuries will get bid to the stratosphere, but at some point you’ve got to get a real return. And so bonds have to sell off to get back to that real return — after all, all crises are credit crises, right,? And then equities are going to go once there’s not leverage out there for share buy backs and stuff like that.That’s why I think the next recession is going to be a barn-burner.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with David Collum (74m:53s)
