Charles Smith
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Articles by Charles Smith
25 Years of Higher Interest Rates Ahead?
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The Potential Winners and Losers in Reshoring Supply Chains
Until values, priorities and incentives change, "the lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock and on back order, with no estimate of a future delivery date." The ultimate winners and losers in reshoring supply chains to North America have yet to be determined, and may change depending on the time frame.
The Potential Winners and Losers in Reshoring Supply Chains
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The Winners and Losers in 21st Century America
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The Wile E. Coyote Recession
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What's "Normal" in a Hyper-Normalized World?
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The Family Home: From Shelter to Asset to Liability
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This Nails It: The Doom Loop of Housing Construction Quality
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Trade, Tariffs, Currencies, Colonialism, the Gold Watch and Everything
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Last Gasp of the Landfill Economy
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A Decade of Headwinds
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The Financial Kessler Effect
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After the Tariff Earthquake
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The Global Trade Game: Jokers Are Wild
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Why the Global Recession Will be Deeper and Longer Than Pundits Anticipate
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Ultra-Processed Life
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oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: POD People 2025
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The Economy of Denial: Addiction, Extortion, Deception
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Baby Boomers Own 42% Of All Real Estate — And Nobody Can Afford To Buy It
There’s a peculiarly flawed logic behind the widely held view that the Baby Boomers will seamlessly transfer tens of trillions of dollars of their wealth to the Gen-X and Millennial generations as they exit stage left. This is flawed for a very basic reason: the extremely overvalued assets that will be transferred — real estate and stocks — only reached such extreme overvaluation because there is a surplus of buyers who are sufficiently wealthy (and willing) to pay bubble-inflated prices.
'Superheroes' Reflect Our Powerlessness
And so we end up back in MovieLand, where we vicariously experience having powers we do not possess in real life. Films reflect the collective unconscious in ironic ways. During the Great Depression, films didn’t dwell on the miseries of real life; they were carefree concoctions making light of the idle rich (The Thin Man, 1934, My Man Godfrey, 1936), with the realistic (but still ending on a positive note) The Grapes of Wrath arriving a decade into the Depression in 1940.
The Anti-Consumers
Who are the biggest chumps in today's economy? One set of contenders is the corporations and marketers buying social media and search data on Anti-Consumers like myself who get their dopamine rushes from producing, not consuming and who experience extremely negative emotions when spending money on anything but the bare essentials. Anti-Consumers are anathema to corporations selling low-quality goods and services based on the dopamine hits generated by taste, convenience, novelty and status.
Maybe We're Closer to 'You'll Own Nothing' Than We Realize
Maybe we should rephrase the slogan to “you’ll appear to own things you don’t actually control and be happy.” The World Economic Forum’s catchphrase you’ll own nothing and be happy was widely mocked as an eyebrow-raising vision of a “sharing economy” future without the implicit agency granted by full ownership. Renting stuff that one needed only for one-time use has long been a market, and car-sharing makes sense for urban dwellers who only need a vehicle on occasion.
Financial Forecast 2025-2032: Please Don't Be Naive
Rather than attempt to evade Caesar's reach, a better strategy might be to 'go gray': blend in, appear average. Let's start by stipulating that I don't "like" this forecast. I'm not "talking my book" (for example, promoting nuclear power because I own shares in a uranium mine) or issuing this forecast because I favor it. I simply see it as the most likely trajectory of the global financial system, based on history and the dynamics of human systems.
Data tampering is an underrated threat — get your backup ready
World Backup Day is an annual reminder of how important it is to have an up-to-date, readily accessible copy of everything that matters to your business. Resilient backups allow you to recover more quickly from data damage, disruption, or loss, particularly if a ransomware attack has resulted in encrypted or deleted files. These are well-known and widely reported benefits of backups — but there’s more.
Irony Alert: 'Outlawing' Recession Has Made a Monster Recession Inevitable
Those who came of age after 1982 have never experienced a real recession, and so they’re unprepared for anything other than guarantees of rescue and permanent expansion. The mainstream view is that recession is caused by economic-financial factors. The mainstream view is wrong, for recession is ultimately caused by Wetware1.0–human nature.
Our Tax System Is an Unfair Mess: Here's How to Fix It
Tax reform is admittedly a field of dreams: the entrenched elites who pull the levers of the status quo will use their power to game or modify any reform that limits their greed, and so any real tax reform is reduced to pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Nonetheless, discussing an alternative system of taxation that is fairer and simpler helps establish two important things: one, it reveals how far we've drifted from fairness, and two, it provides a template for a future reformist government to follow.
Now Hiring: The Ministry of Failure
Discover more from Charles Hugh Smith's Substack Choosing economic self-reliance, navigating global instability and degrowth, managing burnout, invest in yourself. Over 1,000 subscribers The Ministry of Failure is hiring, as their decades-long expansion is accelerating. You probably don't know about the Ministry, but you see its handiwork everywhere. The principle behind the Ministry's existence and its raison d'etre is simple: failure is more profitable than efficiency.
Now Hiring: The Ministry of Failure
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We're Living in a Neofeudal Bubble
This article originally appeared at Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack and is republished here with permission. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Umbrella Media.
The Psychology of Inflation: What Makes You Say, "No Way Am I Paying That"?
It's a well-recognized human bias to feel losses more acutely than gains. Perhaps something similar occurs with inflation. As essentials soar in cost--i.e. non-discretionary expenses such as shelter, food at home, utilities, childcare, healthcare insurance, etc.--our only response is sighing resignation: yes, it's a ripoff but there's little we can do about it without making major changes in our lives. Discretionary purchases are a different matter.
When Shelter Becomes a Speculative Asset, Society Unravels
Does anyone really believe that the renunciation of massive, sustained stimulus of speculation in housing would leave housing valuations unchanged because valuations are solely the result of “shortages”? Let’s begin by stipulating that speculation (i.e. gambling) is part of human nature. The role of regulations and policy is to limit the damage that gambling inevitably inflicts when “sure things” cliff-dive into losses. In other words, where the speculative frenzy and money flows matters.
The Psychology of Inflation: What Makes You Say, "No Way Am I Paying That"?
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When Shelter Becomes a Speculative Asset, Society Unravels
Let's begin by stipulating that speculation (i.e. gambling) is part of human nature. The role of regulations and policy is to limit the damage that gambling inevitably inflicts when "sure things" cliff-dive into losses. In other words, where the speculative frenzy and money flows matters.
When Shelter Becomes a Speculative Asset, Society Unravels
All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.
Six Reasons Why Corporate Profits Will Fall 50%
Should stock valuations track this same decline in profits, it’s entirely reasonable to expect the stock market to lose 2/3 of its valuation premium. All Six of the reasons corporate profits will decline by half are common sense: 1. Reversion to the mean: profits that are double the historical average as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are highly likely not to be a sustainable New Normal.
A Time Capsule from the 1930s: What's Different Now
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Six Reasons Why Corporate Profits Will Fall 50%
All Six of the reasons corporate profits will decline by half are common sense: 1. Reversion to the mean: profits that are double the historical average as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are highly likely not to be a sustainable New Normal. The far more likely track is a reversion to the historical average, which is about 50% below corporate profits' current 12% of GDP. Permanently elevated plateaus of stock valuations and corporate profits are both compelling chimera.
The Peculiar Power of Denial
We’d rather risk societal collapse than face the sacrifices and challenges of revolutionizing our unsustainably neofeudal economy and broken gears of governance. Denial is scale-invariant and universal–we’ve all experienced in some way or another. By scale-invariant, we mean the individual, household, enterprise, city, state and empire all experience denial. Denial has several signature characteristics: 1. The more profound and consequential the issue, the more stubborn our denial.
Six Reasons Why Corporate Profits Will Fall 50%
All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.
The Peculiar Power of Denial
Denial is scale-invariant and universal--we've all experienced in some way or another. By scale-invariant, we mean the individual, household, enterprise, city, state and empire all experience denial. Denial has several signature characteristics: 1. The more profound and consequential the issue, the more stubborn our denial. When a minor cut reddens, we don't go into denial that it's infected, we simply treat it with greater care.
The Peculiar Power of Denial
All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.
How to Select a Town the Rich Won't Gentrify and Ruin
Let’s review how to select a town that the rich won’t ruin via gentrification / swarming in en masse and driving out locals who have to work for a living. Yesterday I discussed how those enriched by two decades of Federal Reserve-inflated bubbles make housing unaffordable for the bottom 90% by gentrifying previously affordable neighborhoods and towns.
Here's Why Housing Is Unaffordable for the Bottom 90%
This is the direct consequence of the Federal Reserve’s decades of unprecedented stimulus: extremes of wealth and income inequality that gave the wealthiest households the means to bid up housing to the point it’s no longer affordable to the bottom 90%. The superficial conclusion that the reason why housing is unaffordable is a scarcity of housing misses a key dynamic in supply and demand: who has too much money and where do they park it??
How to Select a Town the Rich Won't Gentrify and Ruin
Yesterday I discussed how those enriched by two decades of Federal Reserve-inflated bubbles make housing unaffordable for the bottom 90% by gentrifying previously affordable neighborhoods and towns. Once the truly wealthy have snapped up all the most desirable properties in the most desirable enclaves, the merely millionaires start snapping up nearby properties, fueling a bidding war that soon pushes valuations out of reach of the working populace.
How to Select a Town the Rich Won't Gentrify and Ruin
All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.
Here's Why Housing Is Unaffordable for the Bottom 90%
The superficial conclusion that the reason why housing is unaffordable is a scarcity of housing misses a key dynamic in supply and demand: who has too much money and where do they park it?? The reality is obvious but conventional analysts don't see it, largely because it doesn't fit the approved narratives. Here's why housing is unaffordable to the bottom 90%: 1. The U.S. economy is a bubble economy that funnels the vast majority of gains into the top 10% who own 90% of all income producing assets.
Here's Why Housing Is Unaffordable for the Bottom 90%
All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.
We're Living in a Neofeudal Bubble
If you listen to conventional economists, everything’s rosy: thanks to the expansion of alt-energy like wind and solar, energy is getting cheaper, batteries will power the new global economy, we’re getting smarter — just look at the rising number of advanced college degrees, wages are finally growing, inflation is trending down, household balance sheets and corporate profits are strong, debt loads are not an issue yet and GDP is rising.
Reinventing Democracy
All content on this blog is provided by Trewe LLC for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.
We're Living in a Neofeudal Bubble
If you listen to conventional economists, everything's rosy: thanks to the expansion of alt-energy like wind and solar, energy is getting cheaper, batteries will power the new global economy, we're getting smarter -- just look at the rising number of advanced college degrees, wages are finally growing, inflation is trending down, household balance sheets and corporate profits are strong, debt loads are not an issue yet and GDP is rising.
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