by
Adam Taggart
Capital
by
Adam Taggart
Lance Roberts, chief investment strategist of Clarity Financial and chief editor of Real Investment Advice has authored a number of impressive recent reports identifying potential failure points in today's financial markets.
In this week's podcast, Lance explains how the massive flood of investment capital into passively-managed ETFs, along with record amounts of margin debt, have the potential to set the markets afire.
Lance Roberts: This Market Is Like A Tanker Of Gasoline
by Adam TaggartLance Roberts, chief investment strategist of Clarity Financial and chief editor of Real Investment Advice has authored a number of impressive recent reports identifying potential failure points in today's financial markets.
In this week's podcast, Lance explains how the massive flood of investment capital into passively-managed ETFs, along with record amounts of margin debt, have the potential to set the markets afire.
by
Adam Taggart
by
Adam Taggart
In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Cultural Capital
- How will those around you react during a crisis?
- The Fragility Within Our Centralized System
- Lots of dependencies that can fail & bring the entire system to a halt
- Musical Chairs
- Who will have to eat the bad debts when the can can no longer be kicked?
- The Importance Of Global Capital Flows
- They're determining the price of everything
As 2017 kicks off, Chris sits down with Charles to discuss some of the big themes likely to drive events in this new year. The two focus on the growing instability of our centralized systems — economic, energy and otherwise — and pay particular attention to the impact that the huge pool of money sloshing around the world is having on prices everywhere. Right now, that flood of capital — out of bonds and into stocks, the dollar, etc — is the primary driver of prices. Of course, this should make us ask: what will happen when those flows change direction? Or instead of continuing to grow, start receding?
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio and other premium content today.
Off The Cuff: The Global Flow Of Money
PREVIEW by Adam TaggartIn this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Cultural Capital
- How will those around you react during a crisis?
- The Fragility Within Our Centralized System
- Lots of dependencies that can fail & bring the entire system to a halt
- Musical Chairs
- Who will have to eat the bad debts when the can can no longer be kicked?
- The Importance Of Global Capital Flows
- They're determining the price of everything
As 2017 kicks off, Chris sits down with Charles to discuss some of the big themes likely to drive events in this new year. The two focus on the growing instability of our centralized systems — economic, energy and otherwise — and pay particular attention to the impact that the huge pool of money sloshing around the world is having on prices everywhere. Right now, that flood of capital — out of bonds and into stocks, the dollar, etc — is the primary driver of prices. Of course, this should make us ask: what will happen when those flows change direction? Or instead of continuing to grow, start receding?
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio and other premium content today.
by
charleshughsmith
Executive Summary
- What are the big systemic trends that will impact our personal prosperity?
- Realizing why the future will have less of everything
- Strategies for thriving with less
- The importance of owning & managing capital
If you have not yet read Part 1: If Everything's Doing So Great, How Come I’m Not? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we asked 30 questions as a means of assessing whether individuals and households are doing better or worse than they were 10 years ago (2007) and 16 years ago (in 2000)—before the dot-com meltdown recession and the Global Financial Meltdown recession of 2008-09.
Identifying Systemic Trends
These questions attempt to sort out generalized decay that affects everyone—declines in purchasing power, quality of goods and services, etc.—from declines in individual/household health, well-being and financial security.
The questions also attempt to sharpen our awareness of systemic trends: are our prospects brightening or dimming? Are government services improving or declining as our taxes increase?
General trends manifest in different ways in each community/region. For example, the city and county of San Francisco is booming, with strong growth of population (866,000 residents), jobs, rents, housing valuations and tax revenues. Yet even as the city and county of San Francisco’s annual budget swells to an incomprehensible $9.6 billion—larger than the budgets of many U.S. state governments, and four times the annual budget of the city and county of Honolulu, with 998,000 residents—the homeless problem in San Francisco becomes ever more intractable, intrusive and disruptive, despite tens of millions of dollars devoted specifically to improving the options available to the homeless.
This is an example of larger trends that manifest in one way or another in the majority of communities: increasing costs and complexity, diminishing returns on money spent, frustration by taxpayers receiving unsatisfactory services as tax revenues increase, and problems that continue to worsen regardless of how much money is thrown at them.
There are many causal factors driving these trends of decay, rising costs and diminishing returns: a state-cartel system of regulatory capture that enforces cartels and limits competition; rising complexity of regulations that result in reduced productivity and higher costs; a “vetocracy” (Francis Fukuyama’s term) in which special interests can veto any measure with their political clout that impinges on their wealth and power; central bank monetary policies that enrich the wealthy and strip interest income from everyone else; and government manipulation of statistics and markets to manage perceptions—in effect, ignore your lying eyes and believe us: everything’s going great!
Then there's the shadowy monster in the room…
The Keys To Prosperity
PREVIEW by charleshughsmithExecutive Summary
- What are the big systemic trends that will impact our personal prosperity?
- Realizing why the future will have less of everything
- Strategies for thriving with less
- The importance of owning & managing capital
If you have not yet read Part 1: If Everything's Doing So Great, How Come I’m Not? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we asked 30 questions as a means of assessing whether individuals and households are doing better or worse than they were 10 years ago (2007) and 16 years ago (in 2000)—before the dot-com meltdown recession and the Global Financial Meltdown recession of 2008-09.
Identifying Systemic Trends
These questions attempt to sort out generalized decay that affects everyone—declines in purchasing power, quality of goods and services, etc.—from declines in individual/household health, well-being and financial security.
The questions also attempt to sharpen our awareness of systemic trends: are our prospects brightening or dimming? Are government services improving or declining as our taxes increase?
General trends manifest in different ways in each community/region. For example, the city and county of San Francisco is booming, with strong growth of population (866,000 residents), jobs, rents, housing valuations and tax revenues. Yet even as the city and county of San Francisco’s annual budget swells to an incomprehensible $9.6 billion—larger than the budgets of many U.S. state governments, and four times the annual budget of the city and county of Honolulu, with 998,000 residents—the homeless problem in San Francisco becomes ever more intractable, intrusive and disruptive, despite tens of millions of dollars devoted specifically to improving the options available to the homeless.
This is an example of larger trends that manifest in one way or another in the majority of communities: increasing costs and complexity, diminishing returns on money spent, frustration by taxpayers receiving unsatisfactory services as tax revenues increase, and problems that continue to worsen regardless of how much money is thrown at them.
There are many causal factors driving these trends of decay, rising costs and diminishing returns: a state-cartel system of regulatory capture that enforces cartels and limits competition; rising complexity of regulations that result in reduced productivity and higher costs; a “vetocracy” (Francis Fukuyama’s term) in which special interests can veto any measure with their political clout that impinges on their wealth and power; central bank monetary policies that enrich the wealthy and strip interest income from everyone else; and government manipulation of statistics and markets to manage perceptions—in effect, ignore your lying eyes and believe us: everything’s going great!
Then there's the shadowy monster in the room…
by
charleshughsmith
Executive Summary
- The Sole Superpower
- The Importance of factoring in External Costs
- The Biggest Loser
- Which nations to keep your investments in
If you have not yet read Which Countries Will Be Tomorrow's Winners & Losers?, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we examined the thesis that geography and demographics largely define a nation’s destiny.
In Part 2 here, we add other potentially game-changing factors that don’t necessarily fit neatly into either category.
Oh, No: America, The Sole Superpower?
Many of those who disagree with America’s military-interventionist foreign policy of the past 15 years will naturally be appalled by any analysis that suggests America’s preeminence is only going to become even more dominant as the rest of the world is destabilized by the inter-connected dynamics driving global disorder.
The good news is Zeihan sees America becoming much less interventionist as it withdraws into greater self-sufficiency—a topic I’ve discussed in previous essays on autarky. (What If Nations Were Less Dependent on One Another? The Case for Autarky (January 2014))
In Zeihan’s view, America’s preeminence is based on its unparalleled assets of geography and more favorable demographics than its competitors. Zeihan sees the U.S.A’s energy resources, dual-ocean buffers, lack of contiguous-border competitors/enemies, culture of innovation and impressive pool of domestic and foreign capital as an unbeatable combination that no other aspirant to superpower status can match.
In his analysis, the intrinsic weaknesses of other nations and alliances such as the Eurozone have been papered over by the flood of capital that has saturated the global economy for the past 20 years. The source of this ocean of capital is….
And The Winner Is…
PREVIEW by charleshughsmithExecutive Summary
- The Sole Superpower
- The Importance of factoring in External Costs
- The Biggest Loser
- Which nations to keep your investments in
If you have not yet read Which Countries Will Be Tomorrow's Winners & Losers?, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we examined the thesis that geography and demographics largely define a nation’s destiny.
In Part 2 here, we add other potentially game-changing factors that don’t necessarily fit neatly into either category.
Oh, No: America, The Sole Superpower?
Many of those who disagree with America’s military-interventionist foreign policy of the past 15 years will naturally be appalled by any analysis that suggests America’s preeminence is only going to become even more dominant as the rest of the world is destabilized by the inter-connected dynamics driving global disorder.
The good news is Zeihan sees America becoming much less interventionist as it withdraws into greater self-sufficiency—a topic I’ve discussed in previous essays on autarky. (What If Nations Were Less Dependent on One Another? The Case for Autarky (January 2014))
In Zeihan’s view, America’s preeminence is based on its unparalleled assets of geography and more favorable demographics than its competitors. Zeihan sees the U.S.A’s energy resources, dual-ocean buffers, lack of contiguous-border competitors/enemies, culture of innovation and impressive pool of domestic and foreign capital as an unbeatable combination that no other aspirant to superpower status can match.
In his analysis, the intrinsic weaknesses of other nations and alliances such as the Eurozone have been papered over by the flood of capital that has saturated the global economy for the past 20 years. The source of this ocean of capital is….
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