Charles Hugh Smith
In this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Epstein as a case study
- Having departed so far from our values, what is our national identity now?
- Our political, judicial, media, education and financial systems are captive to special interests
- Where do we go from here?
Sometimes, when the news is breaking fast & furious, content we create gets back-burnered for more time-sensitive material. And when we’re able, we bring it out to give it the sunlight it deserves.
This conversation between Chris and Charles Hugh Smith, recorded a month ago, is one of them. It’s a no-holes-barred exploration of today’s culture, which appears to be drifting far from the values that used to serve as the foundation for society. As Charles asks below, in a society where trust has been eroded and prosperity is out of reach for all but the top 1%, who are we?
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com’s other premium content.
(BONUS) Off The Cuff: A Crisis Of National Identity
PREVIEW by Adam TaggartIn this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Epstein as a case study
- Having departed so far from our values, what is our national identity now?
- Our political, judicial, media, education and financial systems are captive to special interests
- Where do we go from here?
Sometimes, when the news is breaking fast & furious, content we create gets back-burnered for more time-sensitive material. And when we’re able, we bring it out to give it the sunlight it deserves.
This conversation between Chris and Charles Hugh Smith, recorded a month ago, is one of them. It’s a no-holes-barred exploration of today’s culture, which appears to be drifting far from the values that used to serve as the foundation for society. As Charles asks below, in a society where trust has been eroded and prosperity is out of reach for all but the top 1%, who are we?
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com’s other premium content.
In this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- What’s driving the latest breakdown in trade talks
- The 2 Chinas: and why it can no longer have it both ways
- The dollar shortage in China
- The great global slowdown
The big news driving the markets this week is obviously the breakdown in trade talks between the US and China. In this week’s podcast, Chris and Charles deconstruct the key variables of the situation and explain why they don’t think a deal can get done anytime soon:
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com’s other premium content.
Off The Cuff: Big Trouble In China Trade Talks
PREVIEW by Adam TaggartIn this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- What’s driving the latest breakdown in trade talks
- The 2 Chinas: and why it can no longer have it both ways
- The dollar shortage in China
- The great global slowdown
The big news driving the markets this week is obviously the breakdown in trade talks between the US and China. In this week’s podcast, Chris and Charles deconstruct the key variables of the situation and explain why they don’t think a deal can get done anytime soon:
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com’s other premium content.
In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Our Current System Is A Servitude Trap
- You need to escape it to prosper
- The Rich Own The Assets & The Rest Own The Debt
- Which is why its so hard to move up socio-economically these days
- Asset Bubbles Pevert Opportunity
- Big lifedesicsions become much more speculative
- The Scary Side of Facebook/Google Media Monoply
- Private industry & the government sharing our data
This was the podcast orginally planned to run last week, but we bumped it to rush to you the time-sensitve reveations from Art Berman regarding the Ghawar oil field depletion data.
In *this* podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith pull back the veil covering the architecture underlying today's society, exposing how the system is designed to trap us all in servitude to the parties running it. From how we're eductated, to the options available to us with our jobs and our money, to how our own personal data is increasingly being used to manipulate us — increasingly the only way to prosper in terms of wealth and well-being is to break from convention and operate outside of the system as much as possible.
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com's other premium content.
Off The Cuff: The Current System Is A Servitude Trap
PREVIEW by Adam TaggartIn this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Our Current System Is A Servitude Trap
- You need to escape it to prosper
- The Rich Own The Assets & The Rest Own The Debt
- Which is why its so hard to move up socio-economically these days
- Asset Bubbles Pevert Opportunity
- Big lifedesicsions become much more speculative
- The Scary Side of Facebook/Google Media Monoply
- Private industry & the government sharing our data
This was the podcast orginally planned to run last week, but we bumped it to rush to you the time-sensitve reveations from Art Berman regarding the Ghawar oil field depletion data.
In *this* podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith pull back the veil covering the architecture underlying today's society, exposing how the system is designed to trap us all in servitude to the parties running it. From how we're eductated, to the options available to us with our jobs and our money, to how our own personal data is increasingly being used to manipulate us — increasingly the only way to prosper in terms of wealth and well-being is to break from convention and operate outside of the system as much as possible.
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com's other premium content.
In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Class Warfare
- Growing tenions between the rural/worker vs urban/financier classes
- Why The Yellow Vest Movement Matters
- It represents a populist anger brewing around the world
- Financialization & Globalization Are The Disease
- They give the elites tremendous advantage over everyone else
- The Empire Is Striking Back
- The global establishment is squashing unrest by every means it has
Chris continues to track the Yellow Vest protests across France Europe because it's representative of a populist ire festering around the globe. Decades of financialization and globalization have created a parasitic elite class that is bleeding the working classes dry.
France is emerging as ground zero for a rebellion against those elites. And the Establishment Empire is doing all it can to suppress the movement before it catches fire in other countries, as it is already threatening to elsewhere in Europe. How soon until we see folks don their own yelow vest in the US, UK, Canada and Australia?
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com's other premium content.
Off The Cuff: The People Are Rising Up Against The Elites
PREVIEW by Adam TaggartIn this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:
- Class Warfare
- Growing tenions between the rural/worker vs urban/financier classes
- Why The Yellow Vest Movement Matters
- It represents a populist anger brewing around the world
- Financialization & Globalization Are The Disease
- They give the elites tremendous advantage over everyone else
- The Empire Is Striking Back
- The global establishment is squashing unrest by every means it has
Chris continues to track the Yellow Vest protests across France Europe because it's representative of a populist ire festering around the globe. Decades of financialization and globalization have created a parasitic elite class that is bleeding the working classes dry.
France is emerging as ground zero for a rebellion against those elites. And the Establishment Empire is doing all it can to suppress the movement before it catches fire in other countries, as it is already threatening to elsewhere in Europe. How soon until we see folks don their own yelow vest in the US, UK, Canada and Australia?
Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com's other premium content.
Executive Summary
- Why conventional analysis may not be our best guide anymore
- The critical importance of scarcity and value-production
- Making the most of your time and capital
- How to best prepare for the popping of the 'Everything' Bubble
If you have not yet read Part 1: What Could Pop the Everything Bubble? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we surveyed the economic and socio-political dynamics that will pop the credit/asset bubbles that have created an illusion of normalcy, continuity and prosperity for the past eight years. So how do we non-elites prepare for the end of the everything bubble and the rise of economic, socio-political disorder?
The Conventional Approach
The conventional approach is to seek out assets that will survive either a deflationary implosion (i.e. an implosive collapse of collateral and debt) or high inflation fueled by massive helicopter money distributions to keep the “growth” machine chugging forward.
The Usual Suspects are real-world tangible assets such as precious metals, real estate, orchards, oil fields, solar panels, etc. These are touted as survivable assets because their utility value remains intact regardless of whether their price in currencies drops or soars.
Another Usual Suspect is intrinsically scarce collectibles such as fine art, early 1960s-era Fender guitars, etc.
A newcomer is bitcoin and the other leading cryptocurrencies, which are seen by many as holding scarcity value due to their limited issuance.
This approach is commonsensical and sound, as far as it goes. But it is ultimately a financial approach, not much different than any other form of sell high, buy low, sell high advice of switching out of overvalued asset classes into undervalued asset classes, and then riding the uptrend in the undervalued asset until it too is overvalued.
This approach assumes the larger socio-political-economic system will sort itself out in due time, i.e. it assumes continuity based on self-correcting mechanisms built into the financial status quo.
I’m not so sure that the financial system has any self-correcting mechanisms left, or that they will function as expected in a phase shift or supernova implosion.
Put another way…
What To Invest In When The Everything Bubble Bursts
PREVIEW by charleshughsmithExecutive Summary
- Why conventional analysis may not be our best guide anymore
- The critical importance of scarcity and value-production
- Making the most of your time and capital
- How to best prepare for the popping of the 'Everything' Bubble
If you have not yet read Part 1: What Could Pop the Everything Bubble? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
In Part 1, we surveyed the economic and socio-political dynamics that will pop the credit/asset bubbles that have created an illusion of normalcy, continuity and prosperity for the past eight years. So how do we non-elites prepare for the end of the everything bubble and the rise of economic, socio-political disorder?
The Conventional Approach
The conventional approach is to seek out assets that will survive either a deflationary implosion (i.e. an implosive collapse of collateral and debt) or high inflation fueled by massive helicopter money distributions to keep the “growth” machine chugging forward.
The Usual Suspects are real-world tangible assets such as precious metals, real estate, orchards, oil fields, solar panels, etc. These are touted as survivable assets because their utility value remains intact regardless of whether their price in currencies drops or soars.
Another Usual Suspect is intrinsically scarce collectibles such as fine art, early 1960s-era Fender guitars, etc.
A newcomer is bitcoin and the other leading cryptocurrencies, which are seen by many as holding scarcity value due to their limited issuance.
This approach is commonsensical and sound, as far as it goes. But it is ultimately a financial approach, not much different than any other form of sell high, buy low, sell high advice of switching out of overvalued asset classes into undervalued asset classes, and then riding the uptrend in the undervalued asset until it too is overvalued.
This approach assumes the larger socio-political-economic system will sort itself out in due time, i.e. it assumes continuity based on self-correcting mechanisms built into the financial status quo.
I’m not so sure that the financial system has any self-correcting mechanisms left, or that they will function as expected in a phase shift or supernova implosion.
Put another way…
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