In this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

• What’s driving the latest breakdown in trade talks
• The 2 Chinas: and why it can no longer have it both ways
• The dollar shortage in China
• The great global slowdown

The big news driving the markets this week is obviously the breakdown in trade talks between the US and China. In this week’s podcast, Chris and Charles deconstruct the key variables of the situation and explain why they don’t think a deal can get done anytime soon:

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

• Our Current System Is A Servitude Trap
  • You need to escape it to prosper
• The Rich Own The Assets & The Rest Own The Debt
  • Which is why its so hard to move up socio-economically these days
• Asset Bubbles Pevert Opportunity
  • Big lifedesicsions become much more speculative
• The Scary Side of Facebook/Google Media Monoply
  • Private industry & the government sharing our data

This was the podcast orginally planned to run last week, but we bumped it to rush to you the time-sensitve reveations from Art Berman regarding the Ghawar oil field depletion data.

In *this* podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith pull back the veil covering the architecture underlying today's society, exposing how the system is designed to trap us all in servitude to the parties running it. From how we're eductated, to the options available to us with our jobs and our money, to how our own personal data is increasingly being used to manipulate us — increasingly the only way to prosper in terms of wealth and well-being is to break from convention and operate outside of the system as much as possible.

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

• Class Warfare
  • Growing tenions between the rural/worker vs urban/financier classes
• Why The Yellow Vest Movement Matters
  • It represents a populist anger brewing around the world
• Financialization & Globalization Are The Disease
  • They give the elites tremendous advantage over everyone else
• The Empire Is Striking Back
  • The global establishment is squashing unrest by every means it has

Chris continues to track the Yellow Vest protests across France Europe because it's representative of a populist ire festering around the globe. Decades of financialization and globalization have created a parasitic elite class that is bleeding the working classes dry.

France is emerging as ground zero for a rebellion against those elites. And the Establishment Empire is doing all it can to suppress the movement before it catches fire in other countries, as it is already threatening to elsewhere in Europe. How soon until we see folks don their own yelow vest in the US, UK, Canada and Australia?

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• American Entrepreneurs Who Flocked to China Are Heading Home, Disillusioned
• Beige Book report shows economy still solid as workers gain greater power
• Google’s “Shadow Workforce” Has Demands
• Wells Fargo reform plans fail to satisfy Fed after scandals: sources
• Alphabet is coming for Uber
• Aphria: The Aftermath Of Short Seller Accusations
• Allegations of G.O.P. Election Fraud Shake North Carolina’s Ninth District
• Amazon workers hospitalized after warehouse robot releases bear repellent
• Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert submits $4.6 billion proposal to save Sears
• 2nd deadliest Ebola outbreak in history spreads to major city, raising new challenges for containment
• Ebola spreads to major Congo city as vaccines a concern
• Selco on the Riots in France, False News, and Manipulated Rage: “Every riot can be the start of SHTF”
• World's biggest oil traders paid bribes in Brazil scandal -prosecutors
• Volkswagen Phasing Out Conventional Vehicles, May Build Cars At Ford Factories In US
• As US coal use drops to 1979 levels, EPA may ease rules on new coal plants
• OPEC and allies agree to cut oil production by 1.2 million barrels per day
• OPEC members say production cut coming, specifics TBD; U.S. crude oil -4%
• California Gives Final OK To Require Solar Panels On New Houses
• California's record wildfire season is set to deliver a new, devastating disaster
• Mass extinctions and climate change: why the speed of rising greenhouse gases matters

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• Here's How Facebook Tracks You When You're Not On Facebook
• The Shocking Doomsday Maps Of The World And The Billionaire Escape Plans
• Inside The Secret World Of Russia's Cold War Mapmakers
• Cops Around the Country Can Now Unlock iPhones, Records Show
• IEA: U.S.-China Trade Row Could Dampen Oil Demand Growth
• The world faces a future of floods, famine, and extreme heat — here’s what it’ll take to bounce back
• Miami is racing against time to keep up with sea-level rise
• Gulf Stream current at its weakest in 1,600 years, studies show 

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The cryptocurrency space is on fire.

Which is why we've lined up Peak Prosperity resident crypto expert Mark Rees to offer answers across the spectrum about Bitcoin, the other digital currencies, and the blockchain. He and Chris will roll up their sleeves to dive deep into a highly-interactive discussion of all things crypto in our upcoming webinar on Sunday January 7, 2018 at noon EST/9am PST.

The full event will last about an hour and half, and draw heavily from audience Q&A. So bring your most pressing questions — you'll be able to ask them directly to Mark and Chris.

To register for the event, click here.

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Executive Summary

• Why conventional analysis may not be our best guide anymore
• The critical importance of scarcity and value-production
• Making the most of your time and capital
• How to best prepare for the popping of the 'Everything' Bubble

If you have not yet read Part 1: What Could Pop the Everything Bubble? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we surveyed the economic and socio-political dynamics that will pop the credit/asset bubbles that have created an illusion of normalcy, continuity and prosperity for the past eight years. So how do we non-elites prepare for the end of the everything bubble and the rise of economic, socio-political disorder?

The Conventional Approach

The conventional approach is to seek out assets that will survive either a deflationary implosion (i.e. an implosive collapse of collateral and debt) or high inflation fueled by massive helicopter money distributions to keep the “growth” machine chugging forward.

The Usual Suspects are real-world tangible assets such as precious metals, real estate, orchards, oil fields, solar panels, etc.  These are touted as survivable assets because their utility value remains intact regardless of whether their price in currencies drops or soars.

Another Usual Suspect is intrinsically scarce collectibles such as fine art, early 1960s-era Fender guitars, etc.

A newcomer is bitcoin and the other leading cryptocurrencies, which are seen by many as holding scarcity value due to their limited issuance.

This approach is commonsensical and sound, as far as it goes. But it is ultimately a financial approach, not much different than any other form of sell high, buy low, sell high advice of switching out of overvalued asset classes into undervalued asset classes, and then riding the uptrend in the undervalued asset until it too is overvalued.

This approach assumes the larger socio-political-economic system will sort itself out in due time, i.e. it assumes continuity based on self-correcting mechanisms built into the financial status quo.

I’m not so sure that the financial system has any self-correcting mechanisms left, or that they will function as expected in a phase shift or supernova implosion.

Put another way…

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

• Driving Blind
  • The data we are depending on is uselessly distorted..
• Underestimated Risk
  • …so we can't see how tenuous things are right now
• Setting Up For A Fall
  • …allowing valuations to get waayy ahead of fundamentals
• A System Waiting For A Trigger
  • …all that's needed is a reason for the system to implode on itself

This week Charles Hugh Smith returns to talk with Chris about the dangerous degree of distortion in today's world. Overvalued assets, ecological overshoot, over-leveraged economies, and increasingly antagonistic geopolitics — these and other other imminent threats should have our leaders and our markets girding against risk. But instead, the dominant narrative being put forth is that all is great and getting better. Complacency is being sold to us — even though, mathematically, the systems we depend on will experience tremendous shocks in the coming future.

When that happens, Charles predicts the current set of rules we live by will quickly be changed by the central state "for the public good". These changes, however, will protect those at the top — the ones whose profligacy has run things of the rails — while stripmining the wealth of the 99%.

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

• The Danger Has Not Yet Passed
  • Levee spillovers and other risks are still in play
• The Impact On The Oil/Gasoline Market
  • Will be much larger than folks were originally expecting
• The Costs To Rebuild Will Be Massive
  • Harvey will likely be the US' most expensive storm to-date
• How To Prepare For Similar Disasters In The Future
  • Take action early. Don't lose urgency once the sun comes out

In the midst of his hour-by-hour analysis of the situation in the Gulf in the aftermath of Harvey, Chris takes time to talk with Charles Hugh Smith about the repercussions of this mega-storm, both short and long-term.

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