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Charles Hugh Smith

Image | Off The Cuff: Shades Of World War One
Off The Cuff: Shades Of World War One
 PREVIEW
by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • The Seeds Of World War 3
    • Where our path in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq may lead
  • Financial Conquest
    • A more bloodless form of war being waged round the world today
  • A Crisis Is Unavoidable At This Point
    • We're too far down the path of 'extend & pretend' to avoid consequences
  • Lack Of Leadership
    • Our system seems too broken to produce anymore courageous leaders
Off The Cuff: Shades Of World War One
 PREVIEW by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • The Seeds Of World War 3
    • Where our path in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq may lead
  • Financial Conquest
    • A more bloodless form of war being waged round the world today
  • A Crisis Is Unavoidable At This Point
    • We're too far down the path of 'extend & pretend' to avoid consequences
  • Lack Of Leadership
    • Our system seems too broken to produce anymore courageous leaders
Image | Why Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure
Why Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure
by charleshughsmith

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, success rather reliably leads to failure and destabilization.

In the macro-economic arena, I think it highly likely that the monetary and fiscal policies of the past six years that are conventionally viewed as successful will lead to spectacular political and financial failures in 2015 and 2016.
Why Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure
 by charleshughsmith

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, success rather reliably leads to failure and destabilization.

In the macro-economic arena, I think it highly likely that the monetary and fiscal policies of the past six years that are conventionally viewed as successful will lead to spectacular political and financial failures in 2015 and 2016.
Image | The 6 Reasons The Next Economic Rescue Will Fail
The 6 Reasons The Next Economic Rescue Will Fail
 PREVIEW
by charleshughsmith

Executive Summary

  • The 6 Factors
    • Rising inequality
    • Reversion to the mean
    • Cost overages
    • Diminishing returns
    • Misleading measurement
    • Expertise mismatch
  • Why the 'success' of the Federal Reserve and other world central banks is ultimately dooming them to failure

If you have not yet read Why Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we examined a variety of reasons why the apparent success of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy may be transitional and brief rather than permanent.

Here in Part 2, we delve into the six other dynamics that make success destabilizing.

Rising Inequality—Perceived and Real

The highly touted “recovery” has been highly uneven in its distribution. The benefits of rising income and wealth have flowed disproportionately to the top 5%, 1% and even 1/10th of 1%.  Those who didn't make it onto the limited-seating Recovery Bus feel the gap between the prospects and wealth of the top tier and their own wealth and prospects widening. Indeed, psychological studies find that we assess our wealth and social position not by our actual material prosperity, but by the narrowing or widening of the perceived wealth gap with our peers.

This is precisely the situation in the U.S. and China. Both economies are supposedly expanding smartly, but the gains are concentrated in a relative few hands; the Rising Prosperity Bus has few seats.  The vast majority perceive themselves as being left behind, and that is highly…

The 6 Reasons The Next Economic Rescue Will Fail
 PREVIEW by charleshughsmith

Executive Summary

  • The 6 Factors
    • Rising inequality
    • Reversion to the mean
    • Cost overages
    • Diminishing returns
    • Misleading measurement
    • Expertise mismatch
  • Why the 'success' of the Federal Reserve and other world central banks is ultimately dooming them to failure

If you have not yet read Why Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we examined a variety of reasons why the apparent success of Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy may be transitional and brief rather than permanent.

Here in Part 2, we delve into the six other dynamics that make success destabilizing.

Rising Inequality—Perceived and Real

The highly touted “recovery” has been highly uneven in its distribution. The benefits of rising income and wealth have flowed disproportionately to the top 5%, 1% and even 1/10th of 1%.  Those who didn't make it onto the limited-seating Recovery Bus feel the gap between the prospects and wealth of the top tier and their own wealth and prospects widening. Indeed, psychological studies find that we assess our wealth and social position not by our actual material prosperity, but by the narrowing or widening of the perceived wealth gap with our peers.

This is precisely the situation in the U.S. and China. Both economies are supposedly expanding smartly, but the gains are concentrated in a relative few hands; the Rising Prosperity Bus has few seats.  The vast majority perceive themselves as being left behind, and that is highly…

Image | Off The Cuff: Today’s Low Oil Price Is A Massive Head-Fake
Off The Cuff: Today’s Low Oil Price Is A Massive Head-Fake
 PREVIEW
by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • The Carnage Wreaked By The Oil Price Collapse
    • Setting us up for whopping future price spike
  • The Geo-Political Chessboard
    • The stakes of the game are rising quickly
  • Forecasting the Fed in 2015
    • Will it (can it) continue to bail out everything & everybody?
  • Calling BS on Today's Market Prices
    • They assume a perfection that cannot exist
Off The Cuff: Today’s Low Oil Price Is A Massive Head-Fake
 PREVIEW by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • The Carnage Wreaked By The Oil Price Collapse
    • Setting us up for whopping future price spike
  • The Geo-Political Chessboard
    • The stakes of the game are rising quickly
  • Forecasting the Fed in 2015
    • Will it (can it) continue to bail out everything & everybody?
  • Calling BS on Today's Market Prices
    • They assume a perfection that cannot exist
Image | Who Will Be Tomorrow’s Superpower?
Who Will Be Tomorrow’s Superpower?
by charleshughsmith

There’s a popular geopolitical parlor game called Who will be the next superpower?

While the game excels at triggering a mind-fogging tsunami of nationalistic emotions, it doesn’t shed much light on the really consequential question: What is power?

These are important questions to ponder as, around the world, unsustainable policies from the 20th century are beginning to fail in earnest. What will the future geopolitical landscape look like in their aftermath?
Who Will Be Tomorrow’s Superpower?
 by charleshughsmith

There’s a popular geopolitical parlor game called Who will be the next superpower?

While the game excels at triggering a mind-fogging tsunami of nationalistic emotions, it doesn’t shed much light on the really consequential question: What is power?

These are important questions to ponder as, around the world, unsustainable policies from the 20th century are beginning to fail in earnest. What will the future geopolitical landscape look like in their aftermath?
Image | Who Will Dominate This Century?
Who Will Dominate This Century?
 PREVIEW
by charleshughsmith

Executive Summary

  • The key requirements for being a word power
  • Is the "superpower" model sustainable in today's age?
  • The key ability to leverage resources
  • Which country(ies) is most likely to dominate in this century?

If you have not yet read Who Will Be Tomorrow's Superpower? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we surveyed the nature of power to explore the concept of superpowers.  In this Part 2, we look at power as the ability to solve problems.

What Are the Available Resources?

Solving problems in the real world is not an abstract project, though abstract concepts may undergird the solutions. In the real world, we have to use whatever resources are available, with an eye on cost, scale and sustainability.

Alternative energy offers a useful example. Almost everyone agrees that alternatives to fossil fuels would be beneficial, but what is generally overlooked is the tiny scale of alternatives in the current scheme of things.  Depending on what’s being included as alternative (hydropower, etc.), alternative energy sources currently comprise a few percentage points of total energy consumption.

To scale alternatives up to even 50% of current consumption will require not just a monumental amount of capital investment; it also requires the invention and manufacture of new systems of energy storage on an equally vast scale.

As has been noted many times, this capital investment includes an extended period of fossil fuels consumption, as we need huge amounts of energy to construct alternative sources and storage systems. Some have characterized this as building an aircraft in the air while keeping your current aircraft aloft.

As Peak Prosperity members know well, capital has a variety of forms, all of which work together: financial, intellectual, social, human, cultural and symbolic. All these forms of capital must be…

Who Will Dominate This Century?
 PREVIEW by charleshughsmith

Executive Summary

  • The key requirements for being a word power
  • Is the "superpower" model sustainable in today's age?
  • The key ability to leverage resources
  • Which country(ies) is most likely to dominate in this century?

If you have not yet read Who Will Be Tomorrow's Superpower? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we surveyed the nature of power to explore the concept of superpowers.  In this Part 2, we look at power as the ability to solve problems.

What Are the Available Resources?

Solving problems in the real world is not an abstract project, though abstract concepts may undergird the solutions. In the real world, we have to use whatever resources are available, with an eye on cost, scale and sustainability.

Alternative energy offers a useful example. Almost everyone agrees that alternatives to fossil fuels would be beneficial, but what is generally overlooked is the tiny scale of alternatives in the current scheme of things.  Depending on what’s being included as alternative (hydropower, etc.), alternative energy sources currently comprise a few percentage points of total energy consumption.

To scale alternatives up to even 50% of current consumption will require not just a monumental amount of capital investment; it also requires the invention and manufacture of new systems of energy storage on an equally vast scale.

As has been noted many times, this capital investment includes an extended period of fossil fuels consumption, as we need huge amounts of energy to construct alternative sources and storage systems. Some have characterized this as building an aircraft in the air while keeping your current aircraft aloft.

As Peak Prosperity members know well, capital has a variety of forms, all of which work together: financial, intellectual, social, human, cultural and symbolic. All these forms of capital must be…

Image | Off the Cuff: Bankers On Edge
Off the Cuff: Bankers On Edge
 PREVIEW
by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • Gold is being driven by speculators in lock-step with the yen
  • So is the S&P 500
  • Why labor pricing power is broken and will stay that way
  • The shale oil Ponzi scheme breaks…and defaults are sure to follow
  • China's economic miracle is about to become a mirage

Charles: And it certainly seems that oil is being used as a weapon. But you know, let's also I would like your view on the idea that the world economy is going into recession. It seems sort of obvious to me. Europe is already either in recession or so stagnant that it is the same as recession. The US is stumbling along with fake growth in terms of households. And then China is rolling over. Japan is going down the sinkhole.

So what will that do to oil if demand really craters like we get another 2008 situation where the financing dries up and people stop borrowing because they are afraid and they stop spending and the whole thing that causes recession. I think that is going to have a potentially huge impact on oil and it would hurt everybody that is producing oil the Saudis included. They may be talking bravely, but I believe that their production costs have risen considerably because they have had to run hundreds of miles of pipe and they are injecting carbon dioxide and sea water and stuff into their wells to keep their production up.

Chris Martenson: The old days of Saudi Arabia sticking a straw in the ground and pulling oil out at a dollar or two a barrel those are long gone because if you have ever seen they have a rack of four pipes that stretch, I forget, 100 miles or something going from the ocean to one of their fields. And each one of those pipes is about the diameter of a large room. They are like 14 feet in diameter they are extraordinarily huge. There is four of them and they are just pumping seawater and they are injecting that down into the field at a variety of points. So yea, that's expensive. And worse the rate of inflation in the mining business has been roughly around 10% for the last 10 years. That means that your costs are going to completely double every seven years when you've got 10% inflation. So that is what the mining industry and particularly the petroleum has been putting up with.
Off the Cuff: Bankers On Edge
 PREVIEW by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • Gold is being driven by speculators in lock-step with the yen
  • So is the S&P 500
  • Why labor pricing power is broken and will stay that way
  • The shale oil Ponzi scheme breaks…and defaults are sure to follow
  • China's economic miracle is about to become a mirage

Charles: And it certainly seems that oil is being used as a weapon. But you know, let's also I would like your view on the idea that the world economy is going into recession. It seems sort of obvious to me. Europe is already either in recession or so stagnant that it is the same as recession. The US is stumbling along with fake growth in terms of households. And then China is rolling over. Japan is going down the sinkhole.

So what will that do to oil if demand really craters like we get another 2008 situation where the financing dries up and people stop borrowing because they are afraid and they stop spending and the whole thing that causes recession. I think that is going to have a potentially huge impact on oil and it would hurt everybody that is producing oil the Saudis included. They may be talking bravely, but I believe that their production costs have risen considerably because they have had to run hundreds of miles of pipe and they are injecting carbon dioxide and sea water and stuff into their wells to keep their production up.

Chris Martenson: The old days of Saudi Arabia sticking a straw in the ground and pulling oil out at a dollar or two a barrel those are long gone because if you have ever seen they have a rack of four pipes that stretch, I forget, 100 miles or something going from the ocean to one of their fields. And each one of those pipes is about the diameter of a large room. They are like 14 feet in diameter they are extraordinarily huge. There is four of them and they are just pumping seawater and they are injecting that down into the field at a variety of points. So yea, that's expensive. And worse the rate of inflation in the mining business has been roughly around 10% for the last 10 years. That means that your costs are going to completely double every seven years when you've got 10% inflation. So that is what the mining industry and particularly the petroleum has been putting up with.
Image | Off the Cuff: 2015 Will See A Return To Global Recession
Off the Cuff: 2015 Will See A Return To Global Recession
 PREVIEW
by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • Bankers Behaving Badly
    • Fraud should be expected when there's no punishment for it
  • Rudderless Leadership
    • It's no wonder voters are 'throwing the bums out'
  • The Japan Time-Bomb
    • Guaranteed to blow up the global economy. But when?
  • 2015: The Year Of Return To Global Recession
    • Charles and Chris make the call
Off the Cuff: 2015 Will See A Return To Global Recession
 PREVIEW by Chris Martenson

In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

  • Bankers Behaving Badly
    • Fraud should be expected when there's no punishment for it
  • Rudderless Leadership
    • It's no wonder voters are 'throwing the bums out'
  • The Japan Time-Bomb
    • Guaranteed to blow up the global economy. But when?
  • 2015: The Year Of Return To Global Recession
    • Charles and Chris make the call
Image | The Consequences of a Strengthening US Dollar
The Consequences of a Strengthening US Dollar
by charleshughsmith

In early September, I made the case for a rising U.S. dollar. Since then the dollar has continued its advance, and is now breaking out of a downtrend stretching back to 2005—and by some accounts, to 1985.

So what does this mean for the global economy?

 

The Consequences of a Strengthening US Dollar
 by charleshughsmith

In early September, I made the case for a rising U.S. dollar. Since then the dollar has continued its advance, and is now breaking out of a downtrend stretching back to 2005—and by some accounts, to 1985.

So what does this mean for the global economy?

 

Image | Why The Strengthening Dollar Is A Sign Of The Next Global Crisis
Why The Strengthening Dollar Is A Sign Of The Next Global Crisis
 PREVIEW
by charleshughsmith

Executive Summary

  • Understanding the two different ways money flows into the US dollar
  • How currency crises elsewhere can send the dollar skyrocketing
  • Why yen, yuan and euro printing are not the same as dollar printing
  • How these accelerating money flows are creating the next global crisis

If you have not yet read The Consequences of a Strengthening US Dollar available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we surveyed the key dynamic that is playing out across the globe: the problems revealed by the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-2009 were not addressed; they were in effect shifted into the foreign exchange (FX) market. Now the risk bubble is in the FX market.

The complexity of the feedbacks into the FX market is nothing short of mind-boggling, and rather than attempt a comprehensive survey, I’m highlighting the dynamics that hold the greatest risks of triggering instability, not just in finance but in geopolitics, trade and commodities.

Two Kinds of Dollar Flows

Let’s start by differentiating between the two kinds of money flows into the dollar:

  1. Money converted from periphery currencies into dollars to pay back loans denominated in dollars
     
  2. Money flowing out of periphery economies and into dollar-denominated assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate and dollar-denominated bank accounts.

Broadly speaking, both of these capital flows are “risk-off,” but they have different effects.

In the first case, money borrowed on the cheap in dollars and invested in high-yield periphery bonds earned a tidy profit as the dollar weakened. The trader picked up a double profit: the arbitrage on the interest rates (borrow at .25% and earn 4+%) and the FX profit from the rise of the periphery currency and the decline of the dollar.

This currency-arbitrage profit reverses when the dollar starts rising, and it quickly wipes out the entire interest-rate profit as it leaps higher.

The carry trade is “risk-on” because money is being borrowed to speculate in interest-rate arbitrage. Deleveraging this trade is “risk-off” because the only way to stem the potential losses as the dollar strengthens is to…

Why The Strengthening Dollar Is A Sign Of The Next Global Crisis
 PREVIEW by charleshughsmith

Executive Summary

  • Understanding the two different ways money flows into the US dollar
  • How currency crises elsewhere can send the dollar skyrocketing
  • Why yen, yuan and euro printing are not the same as dollar printing
  • How these accelerating money flows are creating the next global crisis

If you have not yet read The Consequences of a Strengthening US Dollar available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we surveyed the key dynamic that is playing out across the globe: the problems revealed by the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-2009 were not addressed; they were in effect shifted into the foreign exchange (FX) market. Now the risk bubble is in the FX market.

The complexity of the feedbacks into the FX market is nothing short of mind-boggling, and rather than attempt a comprehensive survey, I’m highlighting the dynamics that hold the greatest risks of triggering instability, not just in finance but in geopolitics, trade and commodities.

Two Kinds of Dollar Flows

Let’s start by differentiating between the two kinds of money flows into the dollar:

  1. Money converted from periphery currencies into dollars to pay back loans denominated in dollars
     
  2. Money flowing out of periphery economies and into dollar-denominated assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate and dollar-denominated bank accounts.

Broadly speaking, both of these capital flows are “risk-off,” but they have different effects.

In the first case, money borrowed on the cheap in dollars and invested in high-yield periphery bonds earned a tidy profit as the dollar weakened. The trader picked up a double profit: the arbitrage on the interest rates (borrow at .25% and earn 4+%) and the FX profit from the rise of the periphery currency and the decline of the dollar.

This currency-arbitrage profit reverses when the dollar starts rising, and it quickly wipes out the entire interest-rate profit as it leaps higher.

The carry trade is “risk-on” because money is being borrowed to speculate in interest-rate arbitrage. Deleveraging this trade is “risk-off” because the only way to stem the potential losses as the dollar strengthens is to…

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