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…
Charles Hugh Smith
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…
Marx, Robotics and the Collapse of Profits
By Charles Hugh Smith Whatever commoditized robots can produce is no longer profitable; rather, the production destroys capital. Yesterday I discussed how robots only do work…
What Is Money? (Yes, We’re Talking About Bitcoin)
By Charles Hugh Smith Good ideas don’t require force. That describes the Internet, mobile telephony and cryptocurrencies. What is money? We all assume we know,…
A Radical Critique of Universal Basic Income
By Charles Hugh Smith This critique reveals the unintended consequences of UBI. Readers have been asking me what I thought of Universal Basic Income (UBI)…
The Demise of Dissent: Why the Web Is Becoming Homogenized
By Charles Hugh Smith In other words, we’ll be left with officially generated and sanctioned fake news and “approved” dissent. We’ve all heard that the…
Is This Why Productivity Has Tanked and Wealth Inequality Has Soared?
By Charles Hugh Smith Needless but highly profitable forced-upgrades are the bread and butter of the tech industry. One of the enduring mysteries in conventional…
Mideast Turmoil: Follow the Oil, Follow the Money
By Charles Hugh Smith In this scenario, time is running out for Saudi Arabia’s free-spending royalty and state — and for all the other free-spending…
How Will Bitcoin React in a Financial Crisis Like 2008?
By Charles Hugh Smith If the ownership of bitcoin is as concentrated as some estimate, then the liquidity issue distills down to the actions of…
Let’s Clear Up One Confusion About Bitcoin
By Charles Hugh Smith If bitcoin can be converted into fiat currencies at a lower transaction cost than the fiat-to-fiat conversions made by banks and…
What The Kennedy Assassination Records Reveal: Uncontrollable Incompetence
By Charles Hugh Smith Imagine Harvey Weinstein wielding a “top secret” stamp to block any exposure of the uncomfortable truth and you have the FBI,…
Why Is Bitcoin a Big Deal?
By Charles Hugh Smith Centralized banking and all other forms of intermediary rentier skims are presented as solid. If history is any guide, these supposedly…