by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
The global recession will be deeper and longer than those relying on models based on the past two decades of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization anticipate.
While everyone focuses on conflicts between nations, few look at the problems shared by nations. Richard Bonugli and I discuss both sets of problems in our latest podcast.
The conflict sphere is dominated by the trade wars that are bubbling up here in the first inning of the global rebalancing of national interests and global trade/financial frameworks. Supporting these frameworks benefits participating nations until they don’t, at which point they’re jettisoned.
The conviction that these frameworks, linch-pinned by the U.S. since the end of World War II in 1945, no longer serve America’s core national security interests, is reaching a rough consensus, and as a result some describe the U.S. as a “rogue superpower.” In other words, now that the U.S. is no longer the dumping ground for global surpluses of production, it’s seen as “going rogue.”