Globalization Has Hollowed Out Rural America
By Charles Hugh Smith The value of local control and local capital far exceed the pathetic “savings” reaped from shoddy commoditized goods. What do we make of an economy…
Charles Hugh Smith
The Grand Irony of RussiaGate: The U.S. Becomes More Like the U.S.S.R. Every Day
By Charles Hugh Smith When the Soviet regime exiled Sakharov in 1980, everybody assumed the USSR was permanent and impregnable to collapse. There are many…
What’s Wrong With The Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics
By Charles Hugh Smith These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing. Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all…
Kafka’s Nightmare Emerges: China’s “Social Credit Score”
By Charles Hugh Smith China is creating Kafka’s nightmare world as the perfection of centralized control of its citizenry. China is rapidly building out a…
The Blowback Against Facebook, Google and Amazon Is Just Beginning
By Charles Hugh Smith This is how we end up with a neofeudal society that benefits the Protected Few at the expense of the powerless,…
The Problem with a State-Cartel Economy: Prices Rise, Wages Don’t
By Charles Hugh Smith The vise will tighten until something breaks. It could be the currency, it could be the political status quo, it could…
15 Years of War: To Whose Benefit?
By Charles Hugh Smith As for Iraq, the implicit gain was supposed to be access to Iraqi oil. Setting aside the 12 years of “no…
Decrypting The Appointment Of John Bolton
By Charles Hugh Smith So perhaps the dominant wing of the Deep State is finally willing to cut a deal with Trump. To many observers,…
Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy?
By Charles Hugh Smith If targeting political extremes generates the most profit, then that’s what these corporations will pursue. As many of you know, oftwominds.com…
Career Advice to 20-Somethings: Create Value as a Mobile Creative
By Charles Hugh Smith Finding work that fits who you are is rarely easy, especially if you don’t fit into the mainstream, and usually it…
Three Crazy Things We Now Accept As “Normal” For The Economy
By Charles Hugh Smith How can central banks “retrain” participants while maintaining their extreme policies of stimulus? Humans habituate very easily to new circumstances, even…
Why the Financial System Will Break: You Can’t “Normalize” Markets that Depend on Extreme Monetary Stimulus
By Charles Hugh Smith Central banks are now trapped. In a nutshell, central banks are promising to “normalize” their monetary policy extremes in 2018. Nice,…
Regulating Cryptocurrencies — And Why It Matters
By Charles Hugh Smith Nations that attempt to limit cryptocurrencies’ ability to solve these problems will find that protecting high costs and systemic friction will…
Could Central Banks Dump Gold in Favor of Bitcoin?
By Charles Hugh Smith All of which brings us to the “crazy” idea of backing fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies, an idea I first floated back…