September 2008 marked the beginning of this Fourth Turning, with the global implosion of financial markets, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, double digit unemployment, six million home foreclosures, a 50% collapse in the stock market, the deepest recession since the 1930s, and shell-shocked consumers defaulting on credit card and auto loans to the tune of hundreds of billions.
As consumer credit contracted, retail stores began going bankrupt in vast numbers. Mall operators were left with 50% or vacancy rates. They couldn’t make the loan payments on their debt. By March of 2009 the country was in a full-blown crisis. My storage area in my basement was filled with food, cases of water and other emergency supplies. I was sure we were at the beginning of an economic period, similar but worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
I certainly overestimated my forecasting ability and underestimated the abilities of the ruling class to take outrageously reckless steps to retain their power and manipulate the masses into believing extreme abnormalcy was actually normal. The first outrage perpetrated by the oligarchs was passing the $700 billion TARP bailout of the feckless Hank Paulson lied and threatened to protect his billionaire buddies.
The fear mongering and fake accounting propagated by Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner, and their corporate media fake news propaganda machines had the sole purpose of shifting the fraudulently created Wall Street private losses to the taxpayers through deficit funded handouts, free money, accounting fraud, and throwing senior citizen savers under the bus.
I will also no longer overestimate the ability of the American populace to see through this charade and come to their senses regarding their unsustainable use of debt to try and maintain an unrealistic lifestyle. Their willful ignorance, created through government education propaganda and social engineering, will not be extinguished until the inevitable financial collapse wipes them out again.
This Fourth Turning certainly has not followed the path of the previous Fourth Turning. The existing social order has thrown every debt based “solution” at this debt-based crisis in order to avoid a 1930s like Depression. As we are eleven years into this Fourth Turning, the actions taken by the ruling class may have delayed the pain, but they have only assured the next leg down will be far worse than it needed to be. The social fabric of the country is being irreparably torn with the ongoing Deep State coup against Trump.
His impeachment and/or election of a gun grabbing socialist will surely lead to civil violence. The continued provocations between superpowers with nuclear weapons and a Middle East always on the verge of apocalypse only needs an arrogant misstep by an egomaniacal leader to trigger a global conflagration. I don’t think I’m overestimating the risk of catastrophe, but time will tell. Fourth Turnings have always swept away the existing social order in a chaotic whirlwind of death and destruction.
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