The Curious Engineer

oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith

2013–2017

1,412 posts

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2017 254

December 2017

  1. The Hidden-in-Plain-Sight Mechanism of the Super-Wealthy: Money-Laundering 2.0
  2. Is One Reason Why the Status Quo Disdains Bitcoin Is the "Wrong People Are Getting Rich"?
  3. "Wealth Effect" = Widening Wealth Inequality
  4. Christmas 2017: Why I'm Hopeful
  5. Santa's Stock Market Rally: Tears of Joy, Or Just Tears?
  6. Un-Merry Christmas: The Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend
  7. Jedi Mind Trick: The Disturbing, Destabilizing Abnormal Is Now Normal
  8. Regulating Cryptocurrencies--and Why It Matters
  9. Have We Reached Peak NFL?
  10. The Christmas Letter I'd Like To See
  11. Could Central Banks Dump Gold in Favor of Bitcoin?
  12. Three Bubbles/Strikes and You're Out
  13. Bitcoin vs Fiat Currency: Which Fails First?
  14. Marx, Robotics and the Collapse of Profits
  15. Misunderstanding the Economics of Robotics
  16. What Is Money? (Yes, We're Talking About Bitcoin)
  17. A Radical Critique of Universal Basic Income
  18. The Cost Basis of our Economy is Spiraling Out of Control
  19. Stock Market 2018: The Tao vs. Central Banks
  20. The Path to Impeachment
  21. The Internecine Deep State Conflict Moves to Stage Two

November 2017

  1. The Asymmetry of Bubbles: the Status Quo and Bitcoin
  2. Did Anyone Do Even a Minimal Check on the Sensationalist Bitcoin Electrical Consumption Story?
  3. My Crazy $17,000 Target for Bitcoin Is Looking Less Crazy
  4. The Problem Isn't Populism: the Problem Is the Status Quo Has Failed
  5. Addictions: Social Media & Mobile Phones Fall From Grace
  6. Thanksgiving 2017: 21 Things I'm Grateful For
  7. Beware the Marginal Buyer, Borrower and Renter
  8. Our National Madness
  9. Want Widespread Prosperity? Radically Lower Costs
  10. The Demise of Dissent: Why the Web Is Becoming Homogenized
  11. The Superhero Complex: Are We Incapable of Saving Ourselves?
  12. Is This Why Productivity Has Tanked and Wealth Inequality Has Soared?
  13. Mideast Turmoil: Follow the Oil, Follow the Money
  14. Forget the Bogus Republican "Reform": Here's What Real Tax Reform Would Look Like
  15. Beat the Crowd
  16. The Fetid Swamp of Tax Reform
  17. Where are Europe's Fault Lines?
  18. Our Culture of Rape
  19. How Will Bitcoin React in a Financial Crisis Like 2008?
  20. The Big Reversal: Inflation and Higher Interest Rates Are Coming Our Way
  21. Let's Clear Up One Confusion About Bitcoin
  22. What's Driving Social Discord: Russian Social Media Meddling or Soaring Wealth/Power Inequality?
  23. What the Kennedy Assassination Records Reveal: Uncontrollable Incompetence

October 2017

  1. Why Is Bitcoin a Big Deal?
  2. Japan Just Killed the "Bitcoin Will Be Banned" Meme
  3. What Could Pop The Everything Bubble?
  4. Observations on Wealth-Income Inequality (from Federal Reserve Reports)
  5. Where To Invest When (Almost) Everything's in a Bubble
  6. Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds
  7. How Much of our Discord Is the Result of the "Engagement" Advert Revenue Model of Social Media?
  8. Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin
  9. Which Rotten Fruit Falls First?
  10. GDP Is Bogus: Here's Why
  11. Fraud, Exploitation and Collusion: America's Pharmaceutical Industry
  12. The United States of Weinstein: Complicity, Greed and Corruption Is the Status Quo
  13. The Fading Scent of the American Dream
  14. The Endgame of Financialization: Stealth Nationalization
  15. Are You Better Off Than You Were 17 Years Ago?
  16. About Those "Hedonic Adjustments" to Inflation: Ignoring the Systemic Decline in Quality, Utility, Durability and Service
  17. Our Protected, Predatory Oligarchy: Dirty Secrets, Dirty Lies
  18. The Consent of the Conned
  19. Migration of the Tax Donkeys
  20. Be Careful What You Wish For: Inflation Is Much Higher Than Advertised
  21. What Few Expect: Inflation Will Surge, Destabilizing the Status Quo
  22. What If the Tax Donkeys Rebel?
  23. 2009 - 2016: Was the Eight-Year Experiment in Maintaining the Status Quo a Success or a Failure?

September 2017

  1. Surprise! The Rules Will Change (But Not to Your Benefit)
  2. Stagnation Is Not Just the New Normal--It's Official Policy
  3. This Chart Defines the 21st Century Economy
  4. Our Crazy-Making, Profiteering Education-Career Maze
  5. You Can Only Choose One: Cheap Oil or a Weak Dollar
  6. The Demise of the Dollar: Don't Hold Your Breath
  7. Loving Our Debt-Serfdom: Our Neofeudal Status Quo
  8. Financialization and The Destruction of the Real Economy
  9. What Is Real Wealth?
  10. Are Facebook and Google the New Colonial Powers?
  11. Hey Advertisers: The Data-Mining Emperor Has No Clothes
  12. Dear Jamie Dimon: Predict the Crash that Takes Down Your Produces-Nothing, Parasitic Bank and We'll Listen to your Bitcoin "Prediction"
  13. Yes, This Time It Is Different: But Not in Good Ways
  14. Housing Bubble Symmetry: Look Out Below
  15. On Repairing/Rebuilding 100,000+ Damaged Houses
  16. The Real Reason Wages Have Stagnated: Our Economy is Optimized for Financialization
  17. Is the High Cost of Housing Crushing Wages?
  18. The Insanity of Pushing Inflation Higher When Wages Can't Rise
  19. The Trouble with Asset Bubbles: If You Stop Pumping, They Pop
  20. Bitcoin, Sour Grapes and the Institutional Herd
  21. Why We're Doomed: Stagnant Wages

August 2017

  1. Why Wages Have Lost Ground in the 21st Century
  2. Systemic Uncertainty, Meet Fragility
  3. The 5 Steps to World Domination
  4. Ideology as Addiction
  5. Next Stop, Recession: The Financial Meteor Storm Is Headed Our Way
  6. Did the Economy Just Stumble Off a Cliff?
  7. Have We Lost the Ability to Adapt to Rapidly Changing Circumstances?
  8. Are We Fiddling While Rome Burns?
  9. Beware the "The Cultural Civil War" Narrative: You're Being Played
  10. We Need a Social Revolution
  11. Are Profit and Healthcare Incompatible?
  12. Why We're Doomed: Our Economy's Toxic Inequality
  13. Are We Already in Recession?
  14. What the Mainstream Doesn't Get about Bitcoin
  15. Powerlessness and Consumerism
  16. Not All Capital Is Equal; Some Is Destructive
  17. Is Another Oil Head-Fake Brewing?
  18. USD: Setting Up a Rip-Your-Face-Off Rally or in Freefall?
  19. Why We're So Risk-Averse: "We Can't Take That Chance"
  20. 6 Key Questions about RussiaGate

July 2017

  1. Meanwhile, Somewhere in the Pentagon...
  2. We Need a Social Economy, Not a Hyper-Financialized Economy
  3. The Toxic Fruit of Financialization: Risk Is for Those at the Bottom
  4. The Two Charts That Dictate the Future of the Economy
  5. There Is Only One Empire: Finance
  6. In the Footsteps of Rome: Is Renewal Possible?
  7. When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth...
  8. The Death Spiral of Financialization
  9. The Over-Quantification of Life
  10. Why 2017 Is Like 1969
  11. Earth's Economy Glorifies Waste, Exploitation, Debt, Expediency and Magical Thinking
  12. We Do These Things Because They're Easy: Our All-Consuming Dependence on Debt
  13. Our Financial Buffers Are Thinning
  14. The "News" Is Content-Free
  15. What's the Safest Investment in Troubled Times?
  16. The Inevitability Of DeGrowth
  17. We Need a New American (Social) Revolution
  18. Our Political Parties Are Obsolete
  19. We're Fragmenting Because our Experience of the Economy Is Fragmenting
  20. A 4th of July Remembrance: Independence Arises from Self-Reliance
  21. The Real Cause of the Opioid Epidemic: Scarcity of Jobs and Positive Social Roles

June 2017

  1. Understanding the Cryptocurrency Boom (and its Volatility)
  2. What Problems Are We Solving by Increasing Complexity?
  3. Proximity Is Destiny
  4. If We Don't Change the Way Money Is Created, Rising Inequality and Social Disorder Are Inevitable
  5. A Stock Market Crash Scenario
  6. The Over-Criminalization of American Life
  7. Automation's Destruction of Jobs: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
  8. What Is the Market Telling Us?
  9. We're in a Boiling-Point Crisis of Exploitive Elites
  10. Can We See a Bubble If We're Inside the Bubble?
  11. When the System Thwarts Sincere, Hard-Working People, the System Has Failed
  12. The Dead Giveaways of Imperial Decline
  13. We've Lost All Sense of the Common Good
  14. Debt Has No Consequences? Color Me Skeptical
  15. The False Promise of Infrastructure Spending
  16. The Path to Inflation: "Helicopter Money"
  17. Projecting the Price of Bitcoin
  18. When the "Fix" Increases Systemic Fragility, Things Fall Apart

May 2017

  1. High-Touch, Low-Touch and the Relentless Automation of Jobs
  2. How Debt-Asset Bubbles Implode: The Supernova Model of Financial Collapse
  3. Will the Crazy Global Debt Bubble Ever End?
  4. Is Your Cost of Living Rising? Why the Elites Aren't Worried About Inflation
  5. Inflation Isn't Evenly Distributed: The Protected Are Fine, the Unprotected Are Impoverished Debt-Serfs
  6. The Keynesian Cult Has Failed: "Emergency" Stimulus Is Now Permanent
  7. Does the World End in Fire or Ice? Thoughts on Japan and the Inflation/Deflation Debate
  8. TINA's Legacy: Free Money, Bread and Circuses and Collapse
  9. Want to Understand Rising Wealth Inequality? Look at Debt and Interest
  10. The Soft Underbelly of Scandinavian "High-Tax Happy-Capitalism"
  11. Why We're Fragmenting: The Status Quo Is Disintegrating
  12. State of Denial: The Economy No Longer Works As It Did in the Past
  13. Globalization and the Rural-Urban Divide
  14. Mao and the Middle Class: What's the Source of Political Power?
  15. How Higher Education Became an Obscenely Profitable Racket That Enriches the Few at the Expense of the Many (Student Debt-Serfs)
  16. What's Killing the Middle Class? (Part 2)
  17. What's Killing the Middle Class? (Part 1)
  18. There Is One Way Out of Debt-Serfdom: Fanatic Frugality
  19. Redefining the Middle Class: It Isn't What You Earn and Owe, It's What You Own That Generates Income
  20. The Elites Have Destroyed the Status Quo's Ability to Self-Correct
  21. International Workers' Day: Profitable Work Will Be Automated, The Rest Will Be Left to Us

April 2017

  1. Are We (Collectively) Depressed?
  2. Are We Really that Divided?
  3. A Rising (Central Bank) Tide Turns Everyone into a Genius
  4. Housing's Echo Bubble Now Exceeds the 2006-07 Bubble Peak
  5. Who Will Live in the Suburbs if Millennials Favor Cities?
  6. Our State-Corporate Plantation Economy
  7. Marx, Orwell and State-Cartel Socialism
  8. Our Intellectual Bankruptcy: The "Religion" of Economics, UBI and Medicare For All
  9. The Left's Descent to Fascism
  10. What's Your Plan B?
  11. The U.S. and China: Why the Sudden Convergence on North Korea?
  12. Millennials Are Homesteading, Buying Affordable Homes, Building Community
  13. Millennials Are Abandoning the Postwar Engines of Growth: Suburbs and Autos
  14. Who's Playing The Long Game--and What's Their Game Plan?
  15. The Media's Missing the Point: Syria, Empire and the Power of Signaling
  16. About that Bug-Out Hideaway....
  17. Why Is the State in Our Bedrooms and Living Rooms as Well as Our Bank Accounts?
  18. Is Your "Democracy" Actually a Totalitarian State? Take this Quick Quiz
  19. Uncertainty and the Humility of Forecasting an Unknowable Future
  20. A Heightened Sense of Vulnerability
  21. Fed Reportedly "Tired of Waiting for Inflation," Plans to Give Every Household $1 Million in Cash

March 2017

  1. Do the Roots of Rising Inequality Go All the Way Back to the 1980s?
  2. "Trickle Down" Has Failed; Wealth and Income Have "Trickled Up" to the Top .5%
  3. When the "Solutions" Become the Problems
  4. The Overlapping Crises Are Coming, Regardless of Who's in Power
  5. Forget ObamaCare, RyanCare, and any Future ReformCare--the Healthcare System Is Completely Broken
  6. The Deep State's Dominant Narratives and Authority Are Crumbling
  7. The Divided Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease
  8. Our Hopelessly Dysfunctional Democracy
  9. Dear America: Better Read the Fine Print on Your Credit Card Statement
  10. Don't You Hate Spammy, Sensationalist Click-Bait Like this?
  11. When Money Is "Free," Discipline Evaporates; When Discipline Evaporates, Decisions Are Disastrous
  12. Now That Everyone's Been Pushed into Risky Assets...
  13. Why Fragmentation Is the Solution, Not the Problem
  14. Are Cities the Incubators of Decentralized Solutions?
  15. Solutions Abound--on the Local Level
  16. The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare
  17. Are Central Banks Losing Control?
  18. Why I Have to Agree with Tim Geithner on This
  19. The Next Domino to Fall: Commercial Real Estate
  20. It's What's Happening Beneath the Surface That Matters: Moral Decay and Rising Inequality
  21. Why Is the Cost of Living so Unaffordable?
  22. The Illusion of Progress
  23. Dear President Trump: If You Want to Lower Healthcare Costs and Stem the Opiate Death Spiral, Legalize Marijuana

February 2017

  1. Virtue-Signaling the Decline of the Empire
  2. Those Systems That Aren't Busy Being Born Are Busy Dying
  3. How Do We Design a DeGrowth Economy?
  4. The Problem with Gold-Backed Currencies
  5. The Criminalization of Financial Independence
  6. Over-Regulation Has Criminalized the Practice of Medicine
  7. There's a Difference: Fake News and Junk News
  8. This Is How the Status Quo Unravels: As the Pie Shrinks, Everybody Demands Their Piece Should Get Bigger
  9. Political Consensus Is Splintering into Class Wars
  10. While Elites Played Empire, America Fell Apart
  11. America's Outmoded "Factory Model" Educational System Needs to be Radically Reinvented
  12. Japan, Inc.: Optimized to 1960, Stumbling in the 21st Century
  13. Loving Our Servitude in America's Plantation Economy
  14. The Colonization of Local-Business Main Street by Corporate America
  15. The Nitty-Gritty of Financial Independence: The Self-Employed Mobile Creative
  16. Expropriation and Impoverishment: "Capitalist" Greece and "Socialist" Venezuela
  17. Which Assets Are Most Likely to Survive the Inevitable "System Re-Set"?
  18. The Central Banks Face Unwelcome Realities: Their Policies Boosted Wealth Inequality and Failed to Generate "Growth"
  19. The Central Banks Pull Back: Now It's Up to Fiscal Policy to "Save the World"
  20. The Triumph of the Technocrats

January 2017

  1. The Fix-Nothing Farce of Symbolic Politics
  2. Why Our System Is Broken: Cheap Credit Is King
  3. What Would a Labor-Centered Economy Look Like?
  4. The Most Important Civil Rights Issue Trump Could Solve with an Executive Order: End the "War on Drugs" Gulag
  5. Want to Bring Back Jobs? It's Impossible Unless We Fix these Four Things
  6. The Protected, Privileged Establishment vs. The Working Class
  7. The Collapse of the Left
  8. 25 Years of Neocon-Neoliberalism: Great for the Top 5%, A Disaster for Everyone Else
  9. Why Outsiders Need Insiders To Get Anything Done
  10. Does a Rogue Deep State Have Trump's Back?
  11. Trump as Lightning Rod--Not Just for Disaffected Progressives, But For Panicked Insiders
  12. Will Our Grandchildren Wonder Why We Didn't Build a Renewable Power Grid When It Was Still Affordable?
  13. The Eight Forces That Are Pressuring Profits
  14. What's Truly Progressive?
  15. The Path to $10,000 Bitcoin
  16. Dear Self-Proclaimed "Progressives": as Apologists for the Neocon-Neoliberal Empire, You Are as Evil as the Empire You've Enabled
  17. Why Don't the U.S. Dollar and Bitcoin Drop to Their Tangible Value, i.e. Zero?
  18. We Can Only Afford One, So Choose Wisely: Social Security/Medicare, Cartel Cronyism or Inflation (a.k.a. Central Banking)
  19. Trump Aims to Cut the Neocon Deep State Off at the Knees
  20. Why Profits Are Faltering
  21. Prosperity = Abundant Work + Low Cost of Living
  22. Fragmentation and the De-Optimization of Centralization

2016 260

December 2016

  1. Fake News, Mass Hysteria and Induced Insanity
  2. A Tale of Two Housing Markets: Hot and Not So Hot
  3. Grab-Bag of Resolutions for 2017
  4. When Assets (Such as Real Estate) Become Liabilities
  5. Why I'm Hopeful
  6. Crisis of Meaning = Crisis of Work
  7. Why the Massive Expansion of "Money" Hasn't Trickled Down to "The Rest of Us"
  8. Will Tax Cuts and More Federal Borrowing/Spending Fix What's Broken?
  9. What Have the "Experts" Gotten Right? In the Real Economy, They're 0 for 5
  10. Are You a Deplorable? Take This Quiz to Find Out
  11. Recovering America's History of Progressive Populism
  12. Why the Democrats Can't Let Go of Losing
  13. "Fake News", Censorship, Darwin and Democracy
  14. Is the Deep State at War--With Itself?
  15. From Captive Audience to Open Democracy: Why the Mainstream Media Is Freaking Out
  16. U.S. Census Bureau, I.R.S. and St. Louis Federal Reserve Added to Washington Post's list of "Russian Propaganda" Websites
  17. Populism in America: "Follow the Money"
  18. Our "Gaslight" Economy
  19. Our "Gaslight" Financial System
  20. A Disintegrative Winter: The Debt and Anti-Status Quo Super-Cycle Has Turned
  21. A Moment of Gratitude for My Readers and Supporters
  22. Beyond Income Inequality
  23. The Role of Technology in Limiting Privilege and Bias

November 2016

  1. Six Narratives on the Ascendancy of Trump
  2. The Corporate Media's Gulag of the Mind
  3. The Engine of Inequality: Privilege
  4. The Washington Post: Useful-Idiot Shills for a Failed, Frantic Status Quo That Has Lost Control of the Narrative
  5. Why Is the US Dollar Rising?
  6. A Thanksgiving Suggestion: Stop at That Charming Place You've Zoomed Past for Years
  7. Why Reshore Manufacturing? It's the Only Way to Avoid Defective Pirated Parts
  8. The Triumph of the Empty Gesture
  9. The Age of Disintegration: Political Disunity and Elites At War
  10. The Great Con: Political Correctness Has Marginalized the Working Class
  11. The Pressing Problem Nobody Dares Discuss
  12. Now Is the Winter of our Discontent: Our Era of Rising Discord
  13. The New Nobility Uses Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariats
  14. Fearmongering Propaganda Is Immensely Profitable--and Distracting
  15. Seven Suggestions for President-Elect Trump
  16. Who Lost: A Biased Media, Pundits, Pollsters, Political Parties, Warmongers, the Corporatocracy, Pay-to-Play Grifters, Neoliberals
  17. The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance
  18. Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending....
  19. America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired
  20. "Nothing Good Can Come of This Election"--and That's Good
  21. Hillary Is The Perfection of a Corrupt System
  22. Politics As Usual Is Dead
  23. Hillary and the Ghosts of Watergate

October 2016

  1. These Blast Points on Hillary's Campaign... Only The Deep State Is So Precise
  2. The Disaster of Inflation--For the Bottom 95%
  3. Our Landfill Economy
  4. Don't Diss the Dark Ages
  5. The Secrets of Self-Employment: Overhead and Capital Accumulation
  6. Two Sets of Solutions as the Status Quo Crumbles
  7. Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants!
  8. The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed
  9. What Happens When the Electricity Is Off for Three Days?
  10. What Triggers Collapse?
  11. QE/ZIRP Is Crushing the Global Supply Chain, Product Quality and Profits
  12. Ending a Taking Economy and Creating a Giving Economy Part 2
  13. Ending a Taking Economy and Creating a Giving Economy (Part 1)
  14. Where Will All the Money Go When All Three Market Bubbles Pop?
  15. Please Assume Crash Positions
  16. Ungovernable Nation, Ungovernable Economy
  17. USA 2017-2020: An Ungovernable Nation?
  18. "The Island Where People Forget to Die" and Social Ecosystems
  19. This Is How Quiet Fascism Works
  20. Sorry, Central Banks: Risk and Volatility Cannot be Extinguished
  21. The "Nuclear Options:" Oil Pinned Below $30/barrel, US Dollar Rising
  22. It's Time We Crush the Putrid Roach Motels of Philanthro-Crony-Capitalism, Starting with the Clinton Foundation
  23. When Did Our Elites Become Self-Serving Parasites?
  24. Is the U.S. Dollar Set to Soar?
  25. How Do We Create Value When Knowledge Is Almost Free?

September 2016

  1. New Poll Puts Mayor of Cormorant, Minnesota Ahead of Hillary and Trump
  2. You Want to Fix the Economy? Then First Fix Healthcare
  3. Are The 'Invisible Americans' the Key Players in This Election?
  4. Trump, Trade and Taxes
  5. Why the Deep State Is Dumping Hillary
  6. What If We're in a Depression But Don't Know It?
  7. Why the Coming Wave of Defaults Will Be Devastating
  8. The Three Stages of Empire
  9. The ZIRP/NIRP Gods and their PhD Priesthood Have Failed
  10. Fun with Fake Statistics: The 5% "Increase" in Median Household Income Is Pure Illusion
  11. On the Process of Awakening
  12. How About Presenting the Facts and Letting Voters Decide Who's "Fit to Serve"?
  13. The Mainstream Media Bet the Farm on Hillary--and Lost
  14. What's the Real Unemployment Rate? That's the Wrong Question
  15. It's Time to Bring Back Bernie
  16. If Everything Is So Great, How Come I’m Not Doing So Great?
  17. Control What You Can
  18. Our Selfie Society Is Incompatible with Democracy
  19. Identity Politics = Totalitarianism
  20. Our Impoverished, Pathological Society
  21. Labor Day Summary: Wage Earners Have Taken a Beating
  22. The High Cost of Honesty in a Sea of Low-Cost BS
  23. The "Secret Sauce" of the Byzantine Empire: Stable Currency, Social Mobility

August 2016

  1. Dear Millennials: If You Want to Escape Minimum Wage Debt-Serfdom...
  2. Central Banks = Welfare for the Wealthy
  3. Trump By a Landslide?
  4. What's Been Cooking at Our House? Summer 2016
  5. China's Great Divide: A New Cultural Revolution?
  6. What Can We Say About a System that Criminalizes a Safe Painkiller (0 Deaths) and Promotes Big Pharma Opiates that Have Killed 165,000 Americans?
  7. The Stock Market 2015-2016: Ugly Chopfest with an Equally Ugly Megaphone
  8. What Are the Odds that the 2020-2022 Olympics Will Be Cancelled?
  9. Our Society Is Sick, Our Economy Exploitive and our Politics Corrupt
  10. What the Fed Hasn't Fixed (and Actually Made Worse)
  11. It's Time to Abolish the DEA and America's "War on Drugs" Gulag
  12. The Odds of a Global Food Crisis Are Rising
  13. The Deep State's Catch-22
  14. Here's Why Wages Have Stagnated--and Will Continue to Stagnate
  15. The Ultimate Long Game: Autarky and Resilience
  16. The Mainstream Has Failed
  17. The More the Establishment Freaks Out Over Trump, the More Attractive He Becomes
  18. Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary?
  19. If "Everybody Knows the Economy's Doing Better," What Is That Information Worth?
  20. Could Inflation Break the Back of the Status Quo?
  21. What Happens When Rampant Asset Inflation Ends?
  22. Revealing the Real Rate of Inflation Would Crash the System
  23. Inflation Hidden in Plain Sight
  24. The Burrito Index: Consumer Prices Have Soared 160% Since 2001

July 2016

  1. Social Fragmentation Suits the Powers That Be
  2. Will Any Future POTUS Matter (Other Than Launching More Wars)?
  3. A Psychiatric Diagnosis of the U.S. Market: Schizophrenic Disconnect From Reality, Bipolar Mania, Psychotic Delusions of Wealth
  4. Why Real Reform Is Impossible: We Can't Believe the Mighty Titanic Could Actually Sink
  5. How Do We Make America Strong Again? Start Telling the Truth
  6. If We Can't Be Honest, No Solution Is Possible
  7. Could This Rally Be a Head-Fake?
  8. Globalization's Few Winners and Many Losers
  9. We've Entered an Era of Rising Instability and Uncertainty
  10. "Helicopter Money" Won't Fix What's Broken
  11. What If the Consensus on Small-Scale Toolmaking and Agriculture Is Wrong?
  12. Why Helicopter Money Won't Push Stocks Higher
  13. The Unintended Consequences of the $15/Hour Minimum Wage
  14. Risk On/Risk Off: What Schizophrenic Markets Are Telling Us
  15. A Precarious State
  16. Neofeudalism and Peasants with Pitchforks: Corporate Power Destroys Democracy
  17. Governments Change, the Corporatocracy Endures
  18. The Paper Waist Test (and a July 4th Message)
  19. Brexit and the Crisis of Capitalism

June 2016

  1. Brexit, the E.U. and the "Special Relationship" of the U.S./U.K.
  2. Brexit, a Step in the Right Direction: The Optimistic View
  3. Brexit Is What Happens When the Pie Is Shrinking
  4. Understanding Brexit: The Powerless Press Their Thumb in the Eye of the Power Elite
  5. Please Don't Pop My Bubble!
  6. Where Are the Jobs? Mostly In Big Cities
  7. What Does It take to Be Upper Middle Class?
  8. If You Want More Jobs and More Job Stability, Disrupt More, Not Less
  9. How Many Law Schools Need to Close? Plenty
  10. Japan: A Future of Stagnation
  11. The Disaster of De-industrialization
  12. Pity the Poor Central Bankers: Playing Masters of the Universe Is No Longer Fun
  13. Work Won't Be Scarce--It's Paid Work That Will Be Scarce
  14. An Everyman's Guide To Understanding Cryptocurrencies
  15. Why Nothing Progresses (Except Dissatisfaction): Institutionalized Powerlessness
  16. Pity Poor China: There's No Easy Fix to the S-Curve
  17. Good News for Bulls: All Those Open Gaps Below Will Never Get Filled
  18. Bernanke Blew It Big-Time: He Should Have Raised Rates Three Years Ago
  19. Is the Market Rational After All?
  20. The Structure of Collapse: 2016-2019
  21. It's Time to Ditch 4 Years of Costly College for Directed Apprenticeships
  22. Flexible Labor Is the Future

May 2016

  1. The Five Stages of Central Bankers' Failure
  2. The Source of Failure: We Optimize What We Measure
  3. Here's Why All Pension Funds Are Doomed, Doomed, Doomed
  4. The Anger of the Unprivileged Is Rising Globally
  5. The Choice For Venezuela Is Stark: Either Print Money and Fail or Establish Sound Money (USD to the Rescue?)
  6. The War on Cash Is a War on Your Freedom to Opt Out
  7. We're in the Eye of a Global Financial Hurricane
  8. What's Your Monthly Grocery Bill? Ours Is $218
  9. Fed Up with the Fed
  10. Are Property Taxes a "Wealth Tax" on the (Mostly) Non-Wealthy?
  11. A Nation of Housing Haves and Have-Nots
  12. If Geography and Demographics Are Destiny, Who Will Be the Winners and Losers in 2025?
  13. The Destabilizing Consequences of Globalization
  14. Dear Homeowner: If You're Paying $260,000 in Property Taxes Over 20 Years, What Exactly Do You "Own"?
  15. The Coming War of Central Banks
  16. We Need a Complete System Overhaul: 5 Charts That Blow Up the Status Quo
  17. The Meaning of a Multicultural America: 323,341,000 Individuals
  18. No Wonder We're Poorer: Wages' Share of GDP Has Fallen for 46 Years
  19. One Chart Says It All
  20. Eight "New Normal" Charts That Are Insanely Abnormal--and Dangerous
  21. Either Reverse All the Perverse Incentives or the System Will Implode
  22. Why Are We So Unhealthy? Our System Makes Us Sick & Keeps Us Sick

April 2016

  1. Is the World Getting Crazier, But We No Longer Notice?
  2. Why Real Reform Is Now Impossible
  3. America's Entitled (and Doomed) Upper Middle Class
  4. Lessons from Japan: Decades of Decay, Unavoidable Collapse
  5. The Status Quo Has Failed and Is Beyond Reform
  6. Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Melville and Modernism
  7. How Can Older Workers Compete in an Economy That Values Youth?
  8. How Systems Break: First They Slow Down
  9. Which Narrative Will Win Out: Bulls or Bears?
  10. The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility, Collapse Is Inevitable
  11. What Is the Minimum Investment Needed to Achieve Social Mobility?
  12. The Entire Status Quo Is a Fraud
  13. Why Aren't We Talking About a Four-Candidate Race for the Presidency: Two Party Hacks and Trump and Sanders as Independents?
  14. The Root of Rising Inequality: Our "Lawnmower" Economy (hint: we're the lawn)
  15. Japan Desperately Needs a Stronger Dollar, China Desperately Wants a Weaker Dollar: The Fed Can't Please Both
  16. Want To Eat Like an Aristocrat? Grow It Yourself, Make It Yourself
  17. The Network Effect, Jobs and Entrepreneurial Vitality
  18. The Panama Papers: This Is the Consequence of Centralized Money and Power
  19. Triffin's Paradox Revisited: Crunch-Time for the U.S. Dollar and the Global Economy
  20. The Future of Money
  21. Welcome to Frugal Airline

March 2016

  1. Higher Education Is Morally and Financially Bankrupt
  2. How Many Tech Startups Are Empty Shells?
  3. Why the Corporate Media Hates Sanders (and has a Love/Hate Thing with Trump)
  4. Another Reason Corporate Profits Will Plummet: The Managerial/ Professional Class Is Burning Out
  5. What Killed the Middle Class?
  6. Recipe for Collapse: Rising Military and Social Welfare Spending
  7. "Free" Trade, Jobs and Income Inequality: It's Not As Easy As We Might Think
  8. If Hillary Isn't Indicted, the Rule of Law and the Republic Are Dead
  9. When a Friend Takes His/Her Own Life
  10. How to Escape the Purgatory of Minimum Wage/Part-Time Jobs
  11. Wait a Minute--Who's Fascist?
  12. Why Our Financial System Is Like the Titanic
  13. 2016, The Year Of The Red Monkey: Expect Wild, Unending Volatility
  14. It's Not Just the Corrupt, Cronyist Republican Party That's Imploding--the Corrupt, Cronyist Democratic Party Is Imploding, Too
  15. Do Any of the Current Rallies Pass "The Sniff Test"? No.
  16. Cheap Oil, the U.S. Dollar and the Deep State
  17. A Profitless Recession
  18. America's Ruling Classes: No Fear, No Caution, No Prudence
  19. Could Donald Trump Be a New Kind of Transactional President?

February 2016

  1. What If There Are No More Googles, Facebooks or AirBnBs?
  2. How The Seeds Of Revolution Take Root: the Middle Class Loses Upward Mobility
  3. A Teachable Moment: to the Young Person Who Complained About Her Job/Pay at Yelp and Was Promptly Fired
  4. When Currency Pegs Break, Global Dominoes Fall
  5. What the Pundits Don't Get About Trump
  6. The System Has Failed
  7. Think Another Crash Is "Impossible"? Think Again
  8. Why the Chinese Yuan Will Lose 30% of its Value
  9. If Zero Interest Rates Fixed What's Broken, We'd Be in Paradise
  10. 2016: The Year Wishful Thinking Fails
  11. Is the Supreme Court Irrelevant?
  12. Why NIRP (Negative Interest Rates) Will Fail Miserably
  13. If You Want To Be Wealthy, Don't Focus on Owning a House--Build a Business
  14. How Systems Break: First They Slow Down
  15. If Knowledge Is Power, Is It Also Wealth?
  16. The Increasingly Fragile Upper-Middle Class
  17. The Chart of Doom: When Private Credit Stops Expanding...
  18. The Opaque Process of Collapse
  19. Why We Won't Have a "Lehman Moment" in the 2016 Crash
  20. The Global Economy Could Fall Farther and Faster Than Pundits Expect
  21. Stupor Bowl 2016

January 2016

  1. Be Your Own Medicine
  2. Success Is a Source of Destabilization
  3. The Illusion of Safety: Index Funds Are Not Low-Risk
  4. The Self-Serving Apologists for Student Debt-Serfdom
  5. Top-Down "Solutions" = Institutionalized Serfdom, Bottom-Up Solutions = Reviving Opportunity
  6. Central Banks Are Out of Tricks
  7. Another Reason Why the Middle Class and the Velocity of Money Are in Terminal Decline
  8. The Coming Era of Financial Triage
  9. What's Eroding the Middle Class?
  10. Could China's Housing Bubble Bring Down the Global Economy?
  11. Can We See a Bubble If We're Inside the Bubble?
  12. Are We Entering an Earnings/Sales Recession?
  13. The China Syndrome: The Coming Global Financial Meltdown
  14. 2016 Theme #5: The Systemic Failure of High Finance
  15. 2016 Theme #4: The End-Game of Debt-Fueled "Growth"
  16. 2016 Theme #3: The Rise of Independent (non-state) Crypto-Currencies
  17. 2016 Theme #2: the Hollow Shell of Democracy
  18. 2016 Theme #1: The Loss of Great Power Leverage

2015 292

December 2015

  1. Well-Paid Pandering Pundits and the Fantasy of Reform
  2. The Cultural Contradictions That Have Crippled the Great American Middle Class
  3. If You Want to Limit the Power of the Super-Wealthy, Stop Using their Money
  4. Honey, I Shrunk the Middle Class: Perhaps 1/3 of Households Qualify
  5. Deleted Scenes from Star Wars: The Force Awakens
  6. Christmas Cookies
  7. If We Don't Change the Way Money Is Created and Distributed, We Change Nothing
  8. The Most Profitable Work Will Be Automated: The Rest Will Be Left to Us
  9. The World of Work Has Changed, and It's Never Going Back to the "Good Old Days
  10. Central Banks Have Pushed the Middle Class Down into Neofeudal Serfdom
  11. The Devil's Holiday Letter: 2015
  12. Our "Star Wars" Economy: The Fed-Farce Awakens
  13. Money Velocity Is Crashing--Here's Why
  14. There's No Upside Left
  15. Why Has the Labor Participation Rate Plunged?
  16. Is Oil Close to a Tradable Bottom?
  17. The Flaws in Basic Income for Everyone
  18. The Death-Spiral of American Entrepreneurism
  19. The "American Dream" is Over--and Voters Know It
  20. The Fallacy that Weakening Your Currency Generates Prosperity
  21. Is the Fed Finally Being Forced to Consider Main Street?
  22. Why the Fed Has to Raise Rates
  23. Housing Bubble 2 in One Chart
  24. Look Out Below: the Real Economy Just Hit Stall Speed
  25. The Coming Great Recession, Brought to You by the Healthcare Cartel

November 2015

  1. 2015: The Last Christmas in America
  2. Our 10 Favorite (and affordable/well-made) Kitchen Tools
  3. How Much Higher Could The U.S. Dollar Go?
  4. Thanksgiving 2015: 21 Things I'm Grateful For
  5. Why Even a Modest Disruption Will Shatter the Status Quo
  6. Profound Political Disunity Is Now Pitting Rising Elites Against Fading Elites
  7. Is Santa Poised to Fill Christmas Stockings with Coal?
  8. Is This How the Next Global Financial Meltdown Will Unfold?
  9. The Federal Reserve, Interest Rates and Triffin's Paradox
  10. Why The Status Quo Is Doomed: Income Stagnates, Costs Rise
  11. Why The Status Quo Is Doomed, Part 1
  12. No Serious Financial Repercussions from the Paris Attacks? Don't Be Too Sure
  13. The Class War Has Already Started
  14. If We Don't Change the Way Money Is Created and Distributed, Rising Inequality Will Trigger Social Disorder
  15. We Need a Social Economy, Not a Hyper-Financialized Plantation Economy
  16. "Super-Welfare" Guaranteed Income For All Isn't a Solution--It's Just the New Serfdom
  17. Why I Will Never Hire Anyone, Even at $1/Hour
  18. Automation Doesn't Just Destroy Jobs--It Destroys Profits, Too
  19. Camping at Red Rock Canyon
  20. Technology, Competition and the 'Crapification' of Jobs
  21. When Collapse Is Cheaper and More Effective Than Reform
  22. The Most Important Chart You've Never Seen: Tax Receipts Top-Tick the Stock Market
  23. The Global Test Most Will Fail: Surviving the Bust That Inevitably Follows a Boom

October 2015

  1. The Scariest Halloween Stock Market Chart
  2. Untangling America from the American Empire
  3. All Hail Our New Lord and Master, the Stock Market
  4. The Federal Reserve: Illusion of Understanding, Illusion of Control
  5. Don't Think the Status Quo Will Save You
  6. Will this Manic Stock Market Rally End in Tears?
  7. Why Is Wealth/Income Inequality Soaring?
  8. The Real Trouble Begins When Rising Inequality Splinters the Elites
  9. Sorry, "Feel the Bern" Fans: President Sanders Won't Change Anything
  10. A Fatal Accident Waiting to Happen: U.S. Healthcare
  11. Four Ticking Global Time-Bombs Few Even Hear
  12. The Problem Isn't Student Loans--It's Higher Education
  13. Here's Why Housing Must be Propped Up
  14. The Paradox of Risk: Central Planning Is Linear, Reality Is Non-Linear
  15. Where Is the First Helicopter Drop of Money Likely to Land?
  16. Is the Housing Bubble 2.0 About to Encounter a Pin?
  17. I'm 61 and Took the Army Physical Fitness Test: Here's My Score
  18. One Part of the Economy Is Booming: The Underground/Cash-Only Sector
  19. When the Aristocracy Leaves the Commoners in the Dust, The Empire Is Doomed
  20. What Happens to our Economy as Millions of People Lose the Habits of Hard Work?
  21. One True Measure of Stagnation: Not in the Labor Force
  22. Welcome to the Future: Downward Mobility and Social Depression
  23. What's Cooking at Our House: Thai Pumpkin-Chicken Curry
  24. The Dangerous Illusion That Risk Can Be Offloaded Onto Others
  25. You Can't Separate Empire, the State, Financialization and Crony Capitalism: It's One Indivisible System

September 2015

  1. Following in Ancient Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality
  2. China's Leadership: Brilliant or Clueless?
  3. The Echo Bubble in Housing Is About to Pop
  4. Three Strategies to Make Your Life Easier as Times Get Harder
  5. Global Markets: It's Getting Ugly Out There
  6. Time to Trade in Your Jag, Benz, BMW for a Dented Econobox: Days of Rage Are Coming
  7. Financial Independence via Self-Employment: How Do We Do It?
  8. The New Shackle of Serfdom: Clinging to Healthcare Insurance
  9. Why Has Labor's Share of GDP Declined for 40 Years?
  10. Life's Most Important Dramas Are Being Disrupted
  11. As the "Prosperity" Tide Recedes, the Ugly Reality of Wealth Inequality Is Exposed
  12. Here's Why the Status Quo Is Doomed
  13. The American Disease: I Deserve to Get Away with Anything and Everything
  14. The Next Financial Crisis Won't be Like the Last One
  15. Why the Fed Would be Insane to Raise Rates: The Rising U.S. Dollar
  16. The Decline of Oil: Head-Fake or New Normal?
  17. Why the Market Could Soar From Here
  18. Syria: Imperial Responsibility, Imperial Conscience (Yes, We Have a Syrian Friend)
  19. Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Community, Health and Enterprise
  20. Why Capital Is Fleeing China: The Crushing Costs of Systemic Corruption
  21. Will the Fed Have to Save Emerging Markets with QE4?
  22. Is the Stock Market Now "Too Big to Fail"?
  23. China: Doomed If You Do, Doomed If You Don't

August 2015

  1. 5 Trends That Are Shredding the Global Economy
  2. Manipulation = Fragility
  3. The Troubling Decline of Financial Independence in America
  4. Who Will Be the Bagholders This Time Around?
  5. What If The "Crash" Is as Rigged as Everything Else?
  6. Global Markets to Fed: No Rate Hike, the Strong Dollar Is Killing Us
  7. Why the Bear of 2015 Is Different from the Bear of 2008
  8. Is It Time to Get into Crash Positions?
  9. Plunge Protection Teams of the World, Unite!
  10. Yes, We Have No Bananas--or Rate Hikes (Welcome to the Fed's Theater of the Absurd)
  11. One Word Defines This Era: Stagnation
  12. China and the Decline in Quality (and Soon in Profits)
  13. China, the Hollow Dragon
  14. Self-Reliance: Control What You Can (Food/Fitness)
  15. Voting With Your Feet
  16. Acquire Skills, Not Credentials
  17. Our Government, Destroyer of Jobs
  18. Stop Financializing the Human Experience
  19. Forget the Fake Statistics: China Is a Tinderbox
  20. Let's Talk About Solutions, Not Fake Fixes
  21. Here's the Next Crisis "Nobody Saw Coming"
  22. Where Did the GDP "Growth" Go? Not into Wages
  23. I Sure Am Glad There's No Inflation
  24. Billary Clinton and the Perfection of Consumerist Narcissism
  25. Rent Bubble = Housing Bubble = Rent Bubble

July 2015

  1. The Cost of Stagnation: We're Living in Limbo
  2. 7 "Saves" in 7 Months: A Market Going Nowhere Fast
  3. Currency Devaluation: The Crushing Vice of Price
  4. Does "Creative Destruction" Include the State?
  5. When Authorities "Own" the Market, The System Breaks Down: Here's Why
  6. Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble: When Authorities Buy Assets to Prop Up Markets
  7. Is the Echo Housing Bubble About to Burst?
  8. Will the Oil Patch Bust Trigger Recession?
  9. Are Tech Giants' New Buildings Signs of the Top?
  10. We Need a Crash to Sort the Wheat from the Chaff
  11. What's Scarce Geopolitically: Stability, Ways to Get Ahead and Innovation
  12. Thank Goodness Everything's Fixed
  13. Greece and the Problem of Correcting Trade/Productivity Imbalances
  14. When Capitalism Turns to Cannibalism
  15. Diminishing Returns on Central-Planning Policy Extremes = 2016 Crash
  16. Greece and the End of the Euroland Fantasy
  17. Is Greece a Template for U.S. State & Local Government Debt Crises?
  18. Maintaining the Illusion of Stability Now Requires Ever-Greater Extremes
  19. Trouble Abrewing; This Time It Is Different
  20. No Jobs for the Young, No Retirement for the Old
  21. Ragin' Contagion: When Debtors Go Broke, So Do Mercantilist Exporters
  22. Greece's New Money: Many, Not One?
  23. What Choice Do We Have?
  24. The Coming Era of Pension Poverty
  25. Our Spoiled-Brat Economy

June 2015

  1. The Global Template for Collapse: The Enchanting Charms of Cheap, Easy Credit
  2. Greece, Democracy and Magical Thinking
  3. The Chinese Stock Bubble Bursts: Any Questions?
  4. Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart
  5. Collapse, Part 4: Loss of Faith in Public Institutions
  6. Collapse Part 3: No Institutional Path to Contraction
  7. Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay
  8. Collapse, Part 1: Greece
  9. Future Shock and the Greening of America
  10. Diversify Your Portfolio with Informal Credit
  11. Financial Predators and Parasites Want to Live, Regardless of the Cost
  12. What's the Real Unemployment Rate in the U.S.?
  13. Our Phantom Economy
  14. The War On Cash: Officially Sanctioned Theft
  15. The Fed Is Funneling the Investing Herd Off a Cliff
  16. Junk Fees and Debt: The Funding Template for American Cities
  17. If Your BS Detector Isn't Shrieking, It's Broken
  18. The Cost of China's Industrialization: 700 Million People with Diabesity /Cancer /Lung Disease and 225 Million with Mental Disorders
  19. Memo to the Fed and its Media Tool Hilsenrath: We're Not Here to Enrich Your Corporate Cronies
  20. Cancel the F-35 and Build 21st Century Air Superiority with Drones
  21. Being Healthy Is Unprofitable
  22. Liberation Is Unprofitable
  23. Is Our Economy's Cinderella Carriage About to Turn Into a Pumpkin?

May 2015

  1. How Much More Extreme Can Markets Get?
  2. U.S. Households Under Pressure: Stagnant Incomes, Rising Basic Expenses
  3. How Healthcare Is Dooming the U.S. Economy (Three Charts)
  4. Buy This Blog for $10 Million Before It IPOs on the Shenzhen Exchange
  5. Surplus Repression and the Self-Defeating Deep State
  6. The Case for Nationalizing Monsanto
  7. Our Crazy-Making Economy's Endgame: Festering Frustration Seeking an Outlet
  8. When the Current Housing Bubble Finally Bursts
  9. Our Social Depression
  10. Stocks and Bonds Are Due for a Generational Crash of 75%
  11. The Self-Employed Middle Class Hardly Exists Anymore
  12. Is This the Chart of a Healthy Stock Market?
  13. When Europe Gets Greece's Jingle Mail: Dealing with Default
  14. Yet Another Chart That Whimpers "Recession"
  15. The Central Problem with Central Banks: They Become the Greater Fools/Bag-Holders
  16. No Bubble Here: $1.5 Million for 750 Sq. Ft. Flat, Rent a Bed for $1,000/Month, or 20 Beds in 7-Bedroom House for $21,000/Month
  17. S&P 500: A Pause That Refreshes, Or Is the Top In?
  18. Thank You, Readers, for Of Two Mind's 50 Million Page Views
  19. Tax Donkeys: Rich Enough to Pay Most of the Taxes, Not Rich Enough to Buy Politicians
  20. Bank Reserves and Loans: The Fed is Pushing On a String
  21. No Wrongdoing Here, Just 6,300 Corporate Fines and Settlements
  22. Collaboration, Adaptation and Risk: Innovate or Die
  23. Endangered Species: The Self-Employed Middle Class
  24. The Cash Value of Home Gardens
  25. Escaping the Deadly Financial Rip-Tide of Debt and Speculation

April 2015

  1. When the Herd Turns
  2. The Financial Markets Now Control Everything
  3. How Much of our Work Is Compliance, Enforcement and Menial Servitude to the New Aristocracy?
  4. Is This a Blow-Off Top? Four Ways to Tell
  5. Our Financial Future: Infinite Greed Meets a Funny Thing Called Karma
  6. The Rehypothecation of Gold, and Why It Matters
  7. The Old Models of Work Are Broken
  8. Wedges and Triangles: Big Move Ahead?
  9. Ten Wonderful Things I'm Grateful For (Irony Alert)
  10. Disrupt or Be Disrupted
  11. The Value of Learning To Cook
  12. The Changing World of Work 5: "Human Robots" and High-Level Skills
  13. The Changing World of Work 4: The "Signal" Value of Credentials Is Eroding
  14. The Changing World of Work 3: "Full-Stack" Skills
  15. The Changing World of Work 2: Financialization = Insecurity
  16. The Changing World of Work I: America's Nine Classes
  17. What's Cooking at our House: Banh Xeo
  18. Today's Money Regimes Are Doomed To Failure
  19. Rich Middle Class, Poor Middle Class
  20. Neofeudalism 101: Strip-Mining the Upper Middle Class
  21. What Happens to Sales and Employment When Corporate Profits Fall?
  22. Guaranteed Financial Security Is a Fantasy
  23. Who Would Jesus Shun?
  24. The Inevitable Failure of Mechanistic Monetary Policy
  25. The U.S. Economy Slows to Stall Speed
  26. A Shocking Admission: "The Federal Reserve is a Criminal Conspiracy"

March 2015

  1. The Fed Has Failed the Nation, in One Chart
  2. How Many Slots Are Open in the Upper Middle Class? Not As Many As You Might Think
  3. Complacency Reigns Supreme--Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, Right?
  4. Will Cash Always Be Trash, Or Will It One Day Be King?
  5. What Will End the 34-Year US Treasury Bond Bull Market?
  6. The Tried-and-True Blueprint for Raising Taxes
  7. Orwell and Kafka Do America: How the Government Steals Your Money--"Legally," Of Course
  8. Who Left the Crash Window Open?
  9. The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?
  10. Income, Education and Inequality in the "Recovery": Prepare to be Surprised
  11. The Unraveling Is Gathering Speed
  12. Dollar Demand = Global Economy Has Skidded Over the Cliff
  13. The Undebtors: Sworn Enemies of the Vampires of Debt
  14. When It Becomes Serious, First They Lie--When That Fails, They Arrest You
  15. Heroine/Hero: Anna May Wong & Bruce Lee
  16. What Happens to the Stock Market if the U.S. Follows the World into Recession?
  17. Why I Don't Want an Apple Watch (and it's not the battery life)
  18. The Fed Blew It
  19. Why Is Per Capita Energy Consumption at Recession Levels After Six Years of Recovery?
  20. New Orders Look Recessionary
  21. Innovation Series 1: All You Need Is Love--and Rivalry
  22. The One Chart You Need to Predict the Future
  23. The Global Problem: Monetary Policy Can't Fix an Economy's Structural Problems
  24. Solutions Start with Innovation and Transparency
  25. What's America's Fragility Score?
  26. The Three Acronyms That Best Describe This Era: TINA, TANSTAAFL and FUGAZI

February 2015

  1. My 31-Year Old Apple Mac Started Up Fine After 15 Years in a Box
  2. China and the Dragon Tail of Marx
  3. U.S. Healthcare and the Tragedy of the Commons
  4. Why It's So Difficult to Repair Stuff: It's Made That Way
  5. Forget The $1 Trillion Platinum Coin--Here's the $10 Trillion Stone Coin
  6. Grexit Drama Greenlighted for a 5th Season--New Characters, New Plot Twists
  7. Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?
  8. How Many More “Saves” Are Left in the Central Bank Bazookas?
  9. Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation
  10. The Catastrophic Costs of Extend-and-Pretend Are About to Crush Europe
  11. Failed Discipline, Failed Reforms and Grexit: Why the Euro Failed
  12. Greece and Euroland's Crumbling McMansion of Debt
  13. The Cure for Discouragement: a Good Meal
  14. Will China's Currency Peg Be the Next to Fall?
  15. Empire of Lies
  16. Some Thoughts on Greece's Exit from the Euro (Grexit)
  17. The Top 1/10th of 1% Loves a Guaranteed Minimum Income: With One Caveat
  18. What Looks Crazy at First Might Be the Ideal Solution: Meet Greece's New Currency, the U.S. Dollar
  19. How To Make a Hawaii Boy Happy
  20. Greece: Are You Finally Ready to Do the Right Thing and Leave the Euro?
  21. The Lesson of Greece: Only Collapse Makes Real Change Possible
  22. The USD Bull in the Global China Shop
  23. Rates Don't Matter--Liquidity Matters
  24. Greece Just Blew Up the Empire's Death Star of Debt

January 2015

  1. The Brutal Economics of Blogging
  2. Looks Like I'll Be Able to Retire Comfortably at Age 91
  3. Could the U.S. Become the Unrivaled Superpower Again?
  4. The Surprising Consequences of the Global Frenzy for Positive Yield
  5. Greece at the Crossroads: the Oligarchs Blew It
  6. The Federal Reserve Has Declared the Winner in the Generational Financial War
  7. Oil Dinosaurs Face Extinction: State Oil Companies and the Meteor-Strike of Low Oil Prices
  8. Do We Want Solutions, Or Just What's Easy?
  9. Asset Ownership and Our System of Deepening Debt-Serfdom
  10. How Do You Unmanipulate a Manipulated Economy?
  11. Who Benefits When Bubbles Burst?
  12. Our Central Planners Are Breeding Failure
  13. The Fed and the Price of Oil
  14. What Is a National Nervous Breakdown?
  15. The Deep State Strategy: Burn Everyone Else's Oil First, Leave Ours in the Ground
  16. The Achilles Heel of the Global Status Quo: Deflation
  17. 2015: The War on Our Intuition That Something Is Fundamentally Amiss
  18. 2015: Everything Can Be Fixed by Printing More Money
  19. 2015: Asymmetric Oil Warfare
  20. 2015: Now That the Fed Drove Everyone Into Ruinously Risky Bets....
  21. 2015: A World Ruled by Hubris, Willful Blindness and Desperation
  22. Of Two Minds in 2015

2014 307

December 2014

  1. 2015 Housing Trends: Will the Echo Bubble Continue Expanding?
  2. Should I Buy a House in 2015?
  3. Don't Just Follow the Money--Follow the Income
  4. We Just Enjoyed the Last Christmas in America
  5. The Christmas Letter I'd Like To See
  6. I Call BS on Projections of a Decade of $20/Barrel Oil
  7. Will the Fed Intervene in the Oil Market?
  8. Maybe Oil Goes to $70 on its Way to $40
  9. What Will It Take to Be a Superpower in 2025?
  10. What Is the Gold-Oil Ratio Telling Us?
  11. Here's What's Wrong with Corporate America--and the U.S. Economy
  12. The Great Generic Drug Rip-Off
  13. What Choice Do We Have?
  14. The Financialized-Oil Dominoes Are Toppling
  15. Central Banks' 2% Plan to Impoverish You
  16. Central Banks Have Failed Because They Can't Push Wages Higher
  17. Central Banks Create Deflation, Not Inflation
  18. We've Habituated to a Rigged, Fraudulent Market
  19. The Only Two Charts You Need to Understand the S&P 500
  20. The Oil-Drenched Black Swan, Part 4: The Head-Fake Disruption Ahead
  21. The Oil-Drenched Black Swan, Part 3: Multiple Risks, Multiple Unknowns
  22. The Oil-Drenched Black Swan, Part 2: The Financialization of Oil

November 2014

  1. The Oil-Drenched Black Swan, Part 1
  2. Do We Own Our Stuff, or Does Our Stuff Own Us?
  3. If You're Giving Gifts, Consider Giving Tools/Skills
  4. My Thanksgiving: Five Things I Am Thankful For
  5. Prosperity Amidst the Ruins
  6. Nothing Has Changed--and That's the Problem
  7. Central Banks: When We Succeed, We Fail
  8. The Astonishing Rise of Central Bank Fear
  9. Have Central Banks Entered an Undeclared War?
  10. The Falcon Can No Longer Hear the Falconer
  11. Why Living in a Post-Bubble World Is No Fun
  12. One Reason Why Sickcare Is Outrageously Expensive: Needless Scans/Tests
  13. The Cruel Injustice of the Fed's Bubbles in Housing
  14. The Rubber Band Is Stretched--Will It Break?
  15. It's Not Just Japan That's Failed; The "Asian Miracle" Model Has Also Failed
  16. Why the Rising U.S. Dollar Could Destabilize the Global Financial System
  17. Which Cities/States Will Be the First to Default When the Economy Rolls Over?
  18. What Have We Learned From 24 Years of War?
  19. Where Will Risk Erupt This Time?
  20. One Chart, One Question
  21. About That "S&P 500 Will Be 2,150 by Christmas" Call....
  22. If You Really Think It Matters Which Party Controls the Senate, Answer These Questions
  23. Why Tax Just Soda? Why Not Tax Sugar?
  24. Anatomy of a Failing State: Japan's Budgetary Nightmare
  25. Japan's Monetary Pearl Harbor
  26. Home-Grown Potatoes and Lovage

October 2014

  1. How Long Can the Top 10% Households Prop Up the "Recovery"?
  2. Why We're Poorer: Inflation and Deflation Are Now Globalized
  3. Globalization = Permanent Instability
  4. Forget "Free Trade"--Focus on Capital Flows
  5. We Don't Have One Problem--We Have Three Interlocking Sets of Problems
  6. From Home-Grown Tomatoes to Home-Made Pasta Sauce
  7. Does Anyone Else Think the Stock Market Is Living on Reds, Vitamin C and Cocaine?
  8. What's Avant-Garde Now? Social Innovation
  9. What Happens When Cash Is No Longer Trash?
  10. In Uncharted Waters
  11. The Artists' Road to Serfdom: The Commoditization of Creative Content
  12. Our New Robot Overlords & The Third Type of Capital
  13. Why Nations (and organizations) Fail: Self-Serving Elites
  14. Why the State Has Failed to Reform Our Broken Financial System
  15. What Options Are Left for Central Banks?
  16. Why Is the Put-Call Ratio (Fear Gauge) Higher Than in the Lehman Collapse of 2008?
  17. Will the Fed Let the Stock Market Crash Before an Election?
  18. Did Oil's Decline Take the Stock Market Down?
  19. The Stronger Dollar = Stealth QE
  20. Social Schizophrenia, Social Depression
  21. End of the Empire
  22. The Critical Difference Between Rentier Wealth and Wealth Creation
  23. Crony Capitalism Is Kryptonite to Democracy and the Real Economy
  24. At Home in Two Places
  25. What Are We So Afraid Of?
  26. The Sources of America's Political & Financial Dysfunction
  27. Oil, Empire and Playing the Great Game

September 2014

  1. Is the Stock Market Top In?
  2. The Oil Head-Fake: The Illusion that Lower Oil Prices Are Positive
  3. Homemade Enchiladas: Flexible, Fun
  4. What the Global Status Quo Optimizes: Protecting Elites and the Clerisy Class That Serves Them
  5. Global Bellwether: Japan's Social Depression
  6. What Metric Are We Optimizing For?
  7. GDP = Waste
  8. The Counter-Intuitive Rise of the U.S. Dollar
  9. Are We Ready for Daily-Life Drones?
  10. My Sexploitation Foray: Bare Naked Breasts Galore!
  11. Which Global Hegemon Is on Shifting Sands?
  12. Why the Dollar May Remain Strong For Longer Than We Think
  13. Janus Yellen and the Great Transition from Risk-On to Risk-Off
  14. Is Risk-On About to Switch to Risk-Off?
  15. The Hidden Value of Gardens
  16. What If the Easy Money Is Now on the Bear Side?
  17. Why Has Classical Capitalism Devolved to Crony-Capitalism?
  18. How the China Boom Unravels: One Person at a Time
  19. Could the Alibaba Model Undo the Wal-Mart Model?
  20. The China Boom Story: Alibaba and the 40 Thieves
  21. Stocks Have Reached a Permanently High Plateau
  22. Here's Why the Market Could Crash--Not in Two Years, But Now
  23. Have We Reached a Financial Singularity?
  24. Central Bank Monetary Policy Enables Us to Put Off Real Reforms
  25. The Underbelly of Corporate America: Insider Selling, Stock Buy-Backs, Dodgy Profits
  26. Labor Day 2014: In Praise of Messiness

August 2014

  1. Is There Capitalism After Cronyism?
  2. Can a National Quasi-Religion (Pro Sports) Go Broke?
  3. The Housing Echo-Bubble Is Popping
  4. Why Artifice Rules the World: We Have No Choice
  5. It's Not Just Politics That's Broken--The Status Quo's Model of "How the World Works" Is Broken
  6. The New Misery Index
  7. Is the $5 Bill the New $1 Bill?
  8. Why the Fed Must Taper
  9. The Crazy-Making Fed
  10. The Housing Bubble's Silver Lining
  11. Are Capital Inflows Propping Up U.S. Markets?
  12. Don't Think It Won't Happen Just Because It Hasn't Happened Yet: Loss of Faith in the Fed
  13. Have We Forgotten What an Authentic Market Is?
  14. Is Collapse the Only Real "Fix" to Our Healthcare and Legal Systems?
  15. Are There No Hard Limits on Financial Finagling?
  16. We're Relying on Phantom Wealth to Fund Our Retirement
  17. It's Not Just Healthcare That's Bankrupt--It's Our Legal System, Too
  18. Here's Why Wages Might Rise Despite Millions of Unemployed Being Available for Work
  19. The Joys of Being Productive
  20. A Brief Note on the Difference Between Trading and Investing
  21. Is This Decline the Real Deal?
  22. What Are the Options for Those Who Can't/Won't Get a Corporate/Government Job?
  23. How Economies Collapse: Systemic Friction and Debt Are Self-Liquidating
  24. The Slide to Collapse Is Greased with Self-Interest
  25. It Doesn't Take Much Land to Grow A Lot of Food
  26. Why Wait for the Shoe to Hit the Floor? The Case for Selling Now

July 2014

  1. Substituting Debt for Income Is Not Success--It's Failure on an Epic Scale
  2. The Fed's Failure Complicates Its Endgame
  3. Our Marginal Economy
  4. The Case for a Bull or Bear Market in Two Charts
  5. Our Peach Pie Workshop
  6. Are We Addicted to Failure?
  7. The Rot Within, Part III: Our Political Order Is Defined by Favoritism and Extortion
  8. The Rot Within, Part II: Inflation Is Not "Growth"
  9. The Rot Within, Part I: Our Ponzi Economy
  10. The Insiders' Case for a Stock Market Mini-Crash
  11. Degrowth Solutions: Half-Farmer, Half-X
  12. The Coming Crash Is Simply the Normalization of a Mispriced Market
  13. Finding Shelter from the Storm Part 2
  14. Why America's Healthcare (Sickcare) System Is Broken and Unfixable
  15. Why We're Doomed: Interest and Debt
  16. You Want a Solution? Try Not to Get Hurt When It Collapses, Then Start Over
  17. A Reader Asks: How to Find Shelter from the Coming Storms?
  18. Neofeudalism's Tax Donkeys (Yes, You) and the Battle for Control of Resources
  19. Why Housing Will Crash Again--But For Different Reasons Than Last Time
  20. How Recession-Proof Is Your Job Sector?
  21. What's Lurking Beneath the Glossy Veneer of the Jobs Report?
  22. What's Cooking at Our House: Stir-Fried Prawns with Black Beans
  23. (In)Dependence Day 2014: Freedom from Pain, or Freedom from Dysfunction?
  24. Is This a Self-Sustaining Recovery or As Good As It Gets?
  25. The Inevitable Stock Market Reversal: The New Normal Is Just Another Bubble Awaiting a Pop
  26. The Next Global Meltdown Is Baked In: Connecting the Dots Between Oil, Debt, Interest Rates and Risk

June 2014

  1. The Systemic Sources of Geopolitical Turmoil: Instability, Fragmentation, Resource Wars
  2. The Stunted Tree Analogy: Nurturing, Neglect and Entrepreneurial Success
  3. What's Behind the Rise in U.S. Industrial Production?
  4. The Coming Global Generational Adjustment
  5. The Happy Story of Boomers Retiring on Their Generational Wealth Is Wrong
  6. The Fed's Hobson's Choice: End QE and Zero-Interest Rates or Destabilize the Dollar and the Treasury Market
  7. The Generational Short Part 2: Who Will Boomers Sell Their Stocks To?
  8. The Next 20 Years Will Not Be Like the Last 20 Years--Here's Why
  9. Here's What I Recommend in the Stock Market: Zip, Zero, Nada
  10. After 6 Years of Unprecedented Central Planning, the Economy Is More Fragile Than Ever
  11. The Most Destructive Presidencies in American History, Part 2: The Fatal Incoherence of the Bush/Obama Foreign Policy
  12. The Most Destructive Presidencies in U.S. History: George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama
  13. The Generational Short: Banks, Wall Street, Housing and Luxury Retail Are Doomed
  14. The Neofeudal-Neoliberal Arrangement: Since We Own What You Need, We Own You
  15. Sorry, You're Not Allowed: Capital Segregation and Rising Inequality
  16. One Overlooked Reason Why the Middle Class Is in Decline
  17. The Stock Market Is Like a Fish Tank
  18. What's the Source of Soaring Corporate Profits? Stagnant Wages
  19. What's Cooking at our House: Homemade Enchilada Sauce
  20. About Those Forecasts of Eternally Rising Corporate Profits...
  21. The Purchase of Our Republic (guest essay)
  22. Nobody Wins Elections Promising to Trim Waste/Fraud and Simplify Regulations
  23. "Buying Time" Doesn't Fix Financial Crises, It Makes the Next One Worse
  24. The Destroyer of Fake "Recoveries": Unintended Consequences

May 2014

  1. This Is What's Wrong with the Legal System in America
  2. Still Think the Fed Isn't Fueling Inflation? Check Out This Chart
  3. Our "Make It Look Good" Economy Has Failed
  4. Why Are Food Prices so High? Because We're Eating Oil
  5. The Housing "Recovery" in Four Charts
  6. Memorial Day 2014: Just Following Orders
  7. The Essential Role of Volatility, Stress and Dissent
  8. A Productive Economy Is a Trading Circle
  9. A Tale of Two Charts (and Two Economies)
  10. I'm a Fiat Slave, And So Are You
  11. The Decline of Small Business = Decline of Basic Skills
  12. Is Small Business a Threat to the Status Quo?
  13. Investing in Ourselves
  14. Bernanke the Sophist: The Deception Behind QE
  15. How Malinvestment Poisons the Entire Economy
  16. Can the Top 10% Prop Up the Whole Economy?
  17. When The Real Cost is Hidden, Making Good Decisions Is Impossible
  18. The Solution to the Declining Middle Class: Destroy Fixed Costs and Debt
  19. Technology Isn't the Only Source of Innovation
  20. The Decline of Small Business and the Middle Class
  21. The Changing Nature of Middle Class Work
  22. How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable
  23. The Destabilizing Truth: Only the Wealthy Can Afford a Middle Class Lifestyle
  24. Coppock Market Message: Get Out and Stay Out--Check Back in Q1 2015
  25. NASDAQ: Classic Head-and-Shoulders and Blow-Off Top?
  26. Please Stop Me Before I Vote for a Bought-&-Paid-For Demopublican Again
  27. International Workers' Day (May 1) and the New Class: Mobile Creatives

April 2014

  1. Want to Fix Income/Wealth Inequality? Here's How
  2. America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy
  3. A Critique of Piketty's Solution to Widening Wealth Inequality
  4. Are You an Elitist? Class Warfare and the New Nobility
  5. Measured by Gold and the Dow, Wheat Is Cheap (But Maybe Not For Long)
  6. I'm 60 Years Old and Took the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT): Here's My Score
  7. This Is How Empires Collapse
  8. The Political Poison of Vested Interests
  9. Sorry, Fed Inflationistas: Technology Is Deflationary
  10. What's Cooking at Our House: Ciambella
  11. It's Time to Retire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a Measure of Prosperity
  12. It's Time to Ditch the Consumer Price Index (CPI)
  13. What's the Difference Between Fascism, Communism and Crony-Capitalism? Nothing
  14. The Alienation of Work
  15. How To Get a Job Despite the Economy
  16. What's Cooking at our House: Appam and Sambar
  17. Are We Losing Practical Life-Skills?
  18. Now That the U.S. and China Have Picked the Low-Hanging Fruit, Peak Everything Looms
  19. Fed to the Sharks, Part 2: Housing and the Death of the Middle Class
  20. Fed to the Sharks, Part 1: The Fed Takes Our Money, Gives It to Banks Who Loan It Back to Us at 16%
  21. And the Next Big Thing Is ... Degrowth?
  22. What's Cooking at Our House: Local Aquaculture Trout
  23. My Wish for 2016: We Finally Get a President Who Doesn't Kiss Wall Street's Rear End
  24. It's Not Just the Stock Market That's Rigged: the Entire Status Quo Is Rigged
  25. What Happens After the Low-Hanging Fruit Has Been Picked?
  26. April 2016: Dow Jones-30 Suspended Due to Lack of Interest

March 2014

  1. Have We Reached Peak Putin?
  2. How to Build Bone Mass (Tacos)
  3. The Golden Era of the 1950s/60s Was an Anomaly, Not the Default Setting
  4. Dear Keynesians: Your Sad Devotion to Your Failed Religion Hasn't Conjured Up a Recovery--Here's Why
  5. Does Our System Select for Incompetent Sociopaths?
  6. The Incompetence of the Federal Reserve and Deep State Is Unavoidable
  7. What's the Primary Cause of Wealth Inequality? Financialization
  8. What's Cooking at Our House: Chinese-Style Onion Flatbread
  9. The Federal Reserve: Masters of the Universe or Trapped Incompetents?
  10. To Eliminate Flight 370 Theories, Start with a Ruler, Pencil and Map
  11. Pay Our Pensions Or We'll Throw You in Jail: the Legalization of Looting
  12. The Five-Year Fantasy Is Ending
  13. Finally, a Plausible Scenario of What Happened to Flight 370
  14. What's Cooking at Our House: Paella
  15. Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity?
  16. What Happened to Flight 370? An Analysis of What Is Known
  17. How The Fed Has Failed America, Part 2
  18. The Fed Has Failed (and Will Continue to Fail), Part 1
  19. Ukraine, A Geopolitical Choke Point
  20. What's Cooking at Our House: Quiche
  21. Better Than the Black Card: Introducing the Uranium Card
  22. Why Is Our Government (and Deep State) So Incompetent?
  23. How the Empire Might Strike Back
  24. Ukraine: Follow the Energy
  25. Who Gets Thrown Under the Bus in the Next Financial Crisis?
  26. A Healthy Haute Cuisine One-Dish Meal in 20 Minutes

February 2014

  1. Why the Periphery Is Crumbling: The Spoils System Is Cracking
  2. Ukraine: A Deep State Analysis
  3. Clearing Billions in Profit Is About to Get Much Harder
  4. Eating Our Seed Corn: How Much of our "Growth" Is From One-Time Cashouts?
  5. The Dollar and the Deep State
  6. From My Garden to My Table in 20 Minutes
  7. Why Banks Are Doomed: Technology and Risk
  8. Banks Are Obsolete: The Entire Parasitic Sector Can Be Eliminated
  9. How to Make a Million: Extortion Creates its own Antidote
  10. Higher Education: America's Problem That Isn't Being Solved
  11. The Devil's 2014 Missive to His Minions
  12. We Can Be Certain of This
  13. Certainty, Complex Systems, and Unintended Consequences
  14. Greed + Cartels = U.S. Sickcare/ObamaCare
  15. Doomed If We Do, Doomed If We Don't
  16. Our Middleman-Skimming Economy
  17. America's Make-Work Sectors (Healthcare and Higher Education) Have Run Out of Oxygen
  18. The New Super-Food: Pizza
  19. When Conventional Success Is No Longer Possible, Degrowth and the Black Market Beckon
  20. The Mafia State of Mind
  21. The Federal Reserve's Nuclear Option: A One-Way Street to Oblivion
  22. It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
  23. Our Two Most Onerous Taxes: College Tuition and Healthcare Insurance
  24. The "Impossible" But Inevitable Solution: Decentralization

January 2014

  1. Theft Is Deflationary--Especially the Crony-Capitalist/State Kind
  2. In a Typhoon, Even Pigs Can Fly (for a while)
  3. The Real State of the Union: The Erosion of Community
  4. Want to Reduce Income/Wealth Inequality? Abolish the Engine of Inequality, the Federal Reserve
  5. Should the Federal Reserve Stop the Dominoes From Falling?
  6. The Recent "New High" in Stocks Is as Bogus as the Unemployment Rate
  7. The Fed's Solution to Income Stagnation: Make Everyone a Speculator
  8. Two Powder Kegs Ready to Blow: China & India
  9. Dead Mall Syndrome: The Self-Reinforcing Death Spiral of Retail
  10. The First Domino to Fall: Retail-CRE (Commercial Real Estate)
  11. After Seven Lean Years, Part 2: US Commercial Real Estate: The Present Position and Future Prospects
  12. One Blogger's Story About Money
  13. A Thought Experiment in American Autarky
  14. Who Has the Time and Motivation to Comprehend the Mess We're In? Almost Nobody
  15. Resolution #1: Let's Call Things What They Really Are in 2014
  16. It's a Lose-Lose-Lose Deal for America: How Real Estate Bubbles Push Rents Higher
  17. After Seven Lean Years, Part 1: US Residential Real Estate: The Present Position and Future Prospects
  18. Renaissance of the Fix-It Society?
  19. Could 3-D Fabrication Technology Lead to Re-Industrialization?
  20. Janet Yellen, the Nation's New Chief Slumlord
  21. Pimping the Empire, Conservative-Style
  22. Pimping the Empire, Progressive-Style
  23. In Terms of Real Stuff, the Dow's "New High" Is Pure Illusion
  24. Competence, Creativity, Mastery, Genius: The Essential Role of Risk
  25. A New Way of Defining Wealth
  26. Could the Fed Lose Control of the Frankenstein Economy It Has Created?
  27. Eight Trends to Watch in 2014/2015

2013 299

December 2013

  1. When Risk Is Separated From Gain, The System Is Doomed
  2. Austerity Isn't Negative--It's Essential to Good Planning and Decision-Making
  3. The Only Leverage We Have Is Extreme Frugality
  4. Some Themes to Watch in 2014
  5. A Christmas Musical Offering
  6. Why Economics Will Never Be a Legitimate Science
  7. Why Advice From Highly Successful People Is Misleading (and thus potentially harmful)
  8. A Note of Gratitude to Readers and Correspondents
  9. The Case for a Crash in 2014/2015
  10. Do We Even Need a Banking Sector? Not Any More
  11. A Quick Guide to What's Fake: Everything That's Officially Sanctioned
  12. What's Real? What's Fake?
  13. Support Your Non-Mainstream Authors--Buy a Book/eBook
  14. About That "Bull Market Til 2016" Call: Before You Buy the Dip, Check Out This Chart
  15. A Modest Proposal to Radically Reduce the Nation's Bureaucracies
  16. The Python That Ate Your Job
  17. Why Our Consumer-Debt Dependent Economy Is Doomed
  18. Why We're Stuck with a Bubble Economy
  19. Obamacare is a Catastrophe That Cannot Be Fixed
  20. What Does It Take To Be Middle Class?
  21. Looming U.S. Retail Implosion: DeGrowth 2014
  22. Dow 40,000, SPX 4,000: Is this Fed-Fueled Stock Rally Sustainable?
  23. America's Excuse Book: Take Your Choice, Victim or Heartless Hypocrite
  24. Thankfulness: Abundance, Opportunity, Openness

November 2013

  1. Metallic Money (Gold/Silver) vs. Credit Money: Know the Difference
  2. What I'm Grateful For
  3. Why Is Debt the Source of Income Inequality and Serfdom? It's the Interest, Baby
  4. Take the Money and Run: China's Ill-Gotten Wealth Flees Overseas
  5. Taking Stock of the 21st Century: What's Fundamentally Different
  6. If You Must Give Gifts, Consider These Everyday Kitchen Tools
  7. The Dark Heart of Centralized Power
  8. ObamaCare: The Neutron Bomb That Will Decimate the U.S. Economy
  9. Have a Merry DeGrowth Christmas--Boycott Black Friday
  10. The American Model of "Growth": Overbuilding and Poaching
  11. Hey, Is It a Problem That We're All on One Side of the Boat?
  12. Have We Lost Our Common-Sense?
  13. How About Ending Social Security and Paying Retirees with Cash?
  14. Will the Dollar Lose its Reserve Currency Status to an SDR Currency?
  15. The Three Types of Politicians
  16. The Big Lie: Lunch (and Debt) Are Free
  17. Our Era’s Definitive Dynamic: Diminishing Returns
  18. What Stanley Kauffmann Taught Me About Film
  19. Can We Support 75 Million Retirees in 2020?
  20. Could Bitcoin (or equivalent) Become a Global Reserve Currency?
  21. The Generational Injustice of Social (in)Security
  22. The Problem with Pay-As-You-Go Social Programs: They're Ponzi Schemes
  23. Why Is Predicting Crisis/Reset So Difficult?
  24. Unaffordable Recreation and the Ratchet Effect

October 2013

  1. Instability Start on the Margins
  2. What Real Estate Bubble? Oh, You Mean the One That's Bigger Than the 2007 Bubble?
  3. System Reset 2014-2015
  4. The Gathering Storm
  5. Suddenly Useful Eccentrics
  6. The Grand Narrative: Legitimize the Authoritarian State
  7. Is RV Nation at Risk?
  8. The Scramble for Africa's Oil
  9. What Does My Klout Score of 59 Signify?
  10. What Do We Expect to Happen?
  11. The Poverty of our Political Theater of the Absurd
  12. False Positives & the Limits of Predictive Analysis
  13. The Difficult Escape from Student Loan Debt-Serfdom
  14. Are We Approaching Peak Retirement?
  15. The Impossibility of China Issuing a Reserve Currency
  16. Have We Reached Peak Entitlements?
  17. Obama Administration Proposes 2,300-Page "New Constitution"
  18. It's Definitive: We've Reached Peak Jobs
  19. The (Needed) Revolution Emerging in Higher Education
  20. Five Goals for the Era Ahead
  21. Have We Reached Peak Federal Reserve?
  22. The Shutdown Political Game: Inflict Maximum Pain to Score Cheap Points
  23. Have We Reached Peak Government?
  24. One More "The Status Quo Is Saved" Rally and Then...?

September 2013

  1. Peak Walmart?
  2. Camping, Waffles, Snow and Glaciers
  3. The Big-Picture Economy, Part 5: The State, Taxes and the Shredding Social Contract
  4. The Big-Picture Economy, Part 4: Income Disparity and Education
  5. The Big-Picture Economy, Part 3: Scarcity, Risk and Debt
  6. The Big-Picture Economy, Part 2: Surplus, Spending and Debt
  7. The Big-Picture Economy, Part 1: Labor, Imports and the Dollar
  8. The Trouble with Asset Bubbles: If You Stop Pumping, They Pop
  9. Why the Higher Education System Is Unsustainable (i.e. Doomed)
  10. The Fed's Double-Bind
  11. The Infrastructure for a Community-Based Economy
  12. Everything's Fixed, Everything's Great
  13. Employment: Trending Down
  14. Our Huge, Stinking Mountain of Debt: Student Loans
  15. Higher Education Cartel, Meet Creative Destruction
  16. If Employment Is So Great, Why Are Withholding Taxes Declining?
  17. When Dominance Leads to Incompetence and Catastrophe
  18. The Cost of Convenience
  19. Maybe This Is Why We Now Have a Serial-Bubble Economy
  20. Have Advances in Consumer Electronics Reached Diminishing Returns?
  21. America's Energy Boom and the Rising U.S. Dollar
  22. Labor Day 2013: How To Get and Keep a Job in a Fast-Changing Economy

August 2013

  1. If You Want To Know Why Things Are Falling Apart, Look at Total Debt
  2. Freedom Is a Community-Based Economy
  3. Economic Darwinism and the Next Financial Crisis
  4. America's Social Recession: Five Years and Counting
  5. The Immense (and Needless) Human Misery Caused by Speculative Credit Bubbles
  6. The Recession That Never Ended: 2008 -2013 (and Counting)
  7. Up Against Hard Limits: Food and Finance
  8. The Grand Experiment Part 2: Unlimited State Creation of Credit and Cash
  9. The Grand Experiment: Offloading Risk onto the State
  10. The Source of Systemic Crisis: Risk and Moral Hazard
  11. Charting Insolvency: Social Security and Wages
  12. The Trends Few Dare Discuss: Social Security and the Decline in Full-Time Employment
  13. Present Shock and the Fantasy of Change
  14. Why Isn't There a Demonstrably Correct Economic Theory?
  15. Rising Inequality and Poverty: Can They Be Fixed?
  16. How Bad Can Things Get?
  17. That Which Is Incapable of Reforming Itself Disappears
  18. The New, Improved 1984
  19. What's Cooking at our House: Sichuan Green Beans
  20. Credit Outbids Cash = Resource Wars
  21. Why the Shrinking Trade Deficit Will Choke U.S. Corporate Profits
  22. Real Personal Income Points to Recession
  23. The Case for Fed Tapering Sooner Rather Than Later
  24. Which Cities will Survive/Thrive?
  25. What's Cooking at our House: Peach Pies
  26. The Fed Doesn't Control as Much as You Think It Does
  27. Why Oil Could Move Higher--Much Higher

July 2013

  1. The Financial System Doesn't Just Enable Theft, It Is Theft
  2. Counterfeiting Trust
  3. Are We Investing or Are We Just Dodging Thieves?
  4. No Yard? Plant a Deck Garden
  5. Bankruptcy Litigation Does Not Generate New Wealth
  6. What's Up with Inflation?
  7. Earn 25,000 Points To Nowhere
  8. Want to Steal My Mobile Phone? I Didn't Think So
  9. How Incremental Increases Can Lead to Systemic Collapse
  10. On Making Major Transitions
  11. Bernanke "The Only Game in Town": Really?
  12. Is America's Social Contract Broken?
  13. The Problem with Social Security and Medicare
  14. About That "Incomes Are Rising" Claim...
  15. The Overworked and the Idle
  16. A Lazy Gardener's Garden
  17. What Marx Got Right
  18. What Every Student in America Needs to Know About the Federal Reserve
  19. Roots on the Ground
  20. The Sky Is (not) Falling: a “Little More Chicken” Tale
  21. About That Supposed Correlation of the U.S. Dollar and Gold....
  22. 2013 Auto Miles: 1,025; 2013 Bicycle Miles: 850
  23. The Next American Revolution
  24. Opportunity Squandered: We Blew It
  25. Our Energy Slaves Are in Recession
  26. Our Legacy Systems: Dysfunctional, Unreformable

June 2013

  1. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
  2. Why Centralization Leads to Collapse
  3. Why the Status Quo Is Doomed
  4. What Higher Mortgage Rates Mean in the Real World
  5. Financialization = Inequality
  6. Bifurcation Nation
  7. This Is an Extraordinary Time
  8. Every Asset That Depends on Cheap, Abundant Credit (Housing, Bonds, Stocks) Is Doomed
  9. Artificial Abundance, Moral Hazard and the Federal Reserve's Doomsday Machine
  10. Hey Mr. Market, That QE Monkey on Your Back Has You By the Throat
  11. The Real Story of the Cyprus Debt Crisis (Part 2)
  12. The Real Story of the Cyprus Debt Crisis (Part 1)
  13. The Unknown Unknowns and Survivor Bias
  14. The Endgame of State/Local Government Pensions
  15. An Abundance of Bad Decisions
  16. America's Enemies Now Using Carrier Pigeons and Invisible Ink Letters: the Absurdist, Tragicomic Narratives of Domestic Surveillance
  17. The Core-Periphery Model
  18. A Message From Your Friendly ECHELON/Total Awareness/Boundless Informant Surveillance System
  19. On Finding Your Authentic Career in a Fast-Changing Economy
  20. Everything Created Digitally Is Nearly Free--Including Money
  21. Why Serial Asset Bubbles Are Now The New Normal
  22. $179,000 Each--In Debt
  23. Why Suppressing Feedback Leads to Financial Crashes
  24. The Fleeting Beauty of Bubbles and Bonds
  25. What's Cooking at our House: Spicy Buddha's Feast

May 2013

  1. Will Crushing Student Loans and Worthless College Degrees Politicize the Millennial Generation?
  2. How Cheap Credit Fuels Income/Wealth Inequality
  3. Is Oil Cheap?
  4. “I Give A Damn”: A Capitalist Manifesto for the Productive Class
  5. 7 Reasons to Loathe Lists
  6. What's Cooking at Our House: Staff of Life
  7. What If Stocks, Bonds and Housing All Go Down Together?
  8. Generation X: An Inconvenient Era
  9. Present Shock and the Loss of History and Context
  10. Centralization and Sociopathology
  11. The Number of the Beast Is 1667
  12. What's Cooking at Our House: Dosas and Pizza
  13. Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out
  14. The Trick to Suppressing Revolution: Keeping Debt/Tax Serfdom Bearable
  15. The Brewing Generational Conflict
  16. A Brief History of Cycles and Time, Part 2
  17. A Brief History of Cycles and Time, Part 1
  18. What's Cooking at Our House: Tacos
  19. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Next Bull Market
  20. Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption
  21. The Widening Chasm
  22. Bernanke's Neofeudal Rentier Economy
  23. What Is Obvious About This Market?
  24. Part 46: An unstable elixir ready to boil over (serialized fiction)
  25. College Grads: It's a Different Economy
  26. The Mobile Gold Rush
  27. The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo: Diminishing Returns

April 2013

  1. Bubble Symmetry and Housing
  2. Wall Street Is a Rentier Rip-Off: Index Funds Beat 99.6% of Managers Over Ten Years
  3. What's Been Cooking at Our House
  4. China 2.0 Is in Trouble
  5. The Way Forward
  6. Why Krugman and the Keynesians Are Lackeys for the Neofeudal Debtocracy
  7. The Global Status Quo Strategy: Do More of What Has Failed Spectacularly
  8. The Decline of Self-Employment and Small Business
  9. A Radically Simple Life
  10. The Silent Epidemic in a Broken, Deranged System: Stress
  11. How Empires Fall
  12. The Risk-On Recovery Rolls Over
  13. A Couple of Things You Should Know About the Stock Market
  14. Part 45: Ah, Romance: Once Burned, Twice Shy (serialized fiction)
  15. Don't Ask--It's Magic
  16. The Eroding Premium on Truth and Trust
  17. Which Dominoes Are Next to Fall in Europe?
  18. Good Banker, Bad Banker
  19. The Real Cyprus Template (the one you're not supposed to notice)
  20. "The Carrot's in Reach:" The Myth of a Self-Sustaining Recovery
  21. The Proper Use of Credit
  22. The Crowded Trade: Buy-to-Rent Housing
  23. Debt = Serfdom

March 2013

  1. Bernanke Breaks Down: "This Whole Thing Is a Kleptocracy"
  2. Part 44: A Shocking Revelation (serialized fiction)
  3. The Knowledge Economy's Two Classes of Workers
  4. The Ten Best Employers To Work For
  5. The Tailwinds Pushing the U.S. Dollar Higher
  6. Post-Cyprus Blues: Confusion and an Erosion of Faith
  7. Why the Government Is Desperately Trying to Inflate a New Housing Bubble
  8. Part 43: Finally Free to Live Large (serialized fiction)
  9. Read This Blog or the Puppy and Kitten Get It
  10. What Could Cause Interest Rates to Rise?
  11. How I Became a Trillionaire (and Some Thoughts on Inflation)
  12. What's Supposed to Happen, and What Might Happen: 3 Baseline Scenarios
  13. The Deeper Meanings of Cyprus
  14. Part 42: Kylie: a wild poppy turning its iridescent orange blossom gaily to the sun (serialized fiction)
  15. Good News: the Bees Have Returned (at least to our yard)
  16. A Community-Based Alternative to the Welfare State
  17. Net Worth vs. Net Value
  18. The Global Endgame
  19. The Erosion of the U.S. Economy In Two Words: Jobs and Wages
  20. Inequality and the Decline of Labor
  21. Unpopped Housing Bubbles Abound
  22. A Look at U.S. Taxes and Hauser's Law
  23. The Hollowing Out of Private-Sector Employment
  24. Understanding Failed Policies: Wealth Effect, Wage Effect, Poverty Effect
  25. Part 41: "I should have known there was a man in your life—look at your cute little green dress." (serialized fiction)
  26. Capital Controls, $5,000/oz Gold and Self-Directed Retirement Accounts

February 2013

  1. Why Central States/Banks Inflate Asset Bubbles, and Why They Implode
  2. What Could Go Wrong with the Housing Recovery in 2013? Plenty.
  3. To Fix Healthcare, Let 100 Solutions Bloom
  4. What If ObamaCare, Too Big To Fail Banks and the State Are All the Wrong Sized Unit?
  5. Part 40: The true wealth of a kind and loyal male heart (serialized fiction)
  6. ObamaCare: The Neutron Bomb That Will Decimate Employment
  7. About Your $3.16 a Day Healthcare Insurance Plan...
  8. Is There Any Alternative to Wall Street, Globalization and the Savior State?
  9. Why Competition Between Global Players Is Heating Up
  10. The Pareto Economy
  11. Part 39: A Karmic Lesson (serialized fiction)
  12. The Global Endgame in Fourteen Points
  13. Don't Worry, Be Resilient
  14. Europe Is Not "Fixed": Two Charts
  15. Cheap, Abundant Credit Creates a Low-Return, Bubble-Prone World
  16. Note to Fed: Giving the Banks Free Money Won't Make Us Hire More Workers
  17. Part 38: The pixies celebrate victory (serialized fiction)
  18. Is This the Terminal Phase of Global Capitalism 1.0?
  19. Why Reform Won't Work
  20. The Hidden Death of the Ownership Society
  21. Is the Global Recovery Self-Sustaining?
  22. The Echo Boom in Housing-Recovery Stocks
  23. Part 37: When the pixies of romance are frustrated...
  24. Crisis and Opportunity

January 2013

  1. Why We Cannot Print/Borrow/Spend Our Way to Prosperity
  2. America's Four Socioeconomic Classes
  3. Why Employment in the U.S. Isn't Coming Back
  4. Why Employment Is Dead in the Water
  5. Part 36: Three things happen in the house on Green Street
  6. The Road to Debt-Serfdom
  7. The Global Economic Disease in 8 Points and the Cure in 4 Points
  8. The Hipster Techie Mental Map
  9. Is the Central State Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Survive?
  10. The Grand Tradeoff of Risk/Innovation/Growth and Financial Security
  11. A Note of Gratitude and a Few Things About New Media
  12. Money Velocity Free-Fall and Federal Deficit Spending
  13. Misunderstanding Austerity, Stimulus and Demand
  14. Why the Innovation Premium Is Diminishing
  15. Why Expansionist Central States Inevitably Implode
  16. The Neoliberal Financial Skim
  17. Part 35: Dinner, Confession and the Blossoming of Love
  18. Themes for 2013
  19. Martian Central Bank Interested in Buying 100 $1 Trillion Coins
  20. The Rising U.S. Dollar Will Be Corporate Earnings/Market-Negative
  21. What If Corporate Earnings Have Topped Out?
  22. Why Austerity Is Triggering a Crisis
  23. Part 34: An unexpected and extremely unwelcome houseguest
  24. The United States of Delusion
  25. Spoiled Teenager Syndrome
  26. The Dangerous Blindspots of Clueless Keynesians
  27. Will the Next Bear Market be a Planned Event or a Failure of Central Planning?

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