As we wander through the fog of history in the making, unsure who is lying and who is telling the truth, seemingly blind to what comes next, I look to previous Fourth Turnings for a map of what might materialize during the 2nd half of this current Fourth Turning. After a tumultuous, harrowing inception to this Crisis in 2008/2009, we have been told all is well and are in the midst of an eleven-year economic expansion, with the stock market hitting all-time highs.
History seemed to stop and we’ve been treading water for over a decade. Outwardly, the establishment has convinced the masses, through propaganda and money printing, the world has returned to normal and the future is bright. I haven’t bought into this provable falsehood. Looking back to the Great Depression, we can get some perspective on our current position historically.
The Dow is up 450% since its 2009 low, which is the metric used by the establishment to prove their money printing solutions have succeeded in lifting the country from the depths of despair and depression. The narrative peddled to the plebs by the lords of the manor through their fake news media mouthpieces for the past decade is one of solid recovery, as the cancer of debt proliferates through the global intestines, thrusting the patient towards a terminal fate.
The blizzard of lies obfuscating the reality of our economic decline has been so persistent, critical thinking Americans have lost all trust in the existing social order. The fabric of our nation has been torn asunder through the machinations and criminality of the Deep State players and their apparatchiks disseminated throughout our political, financial, government and media structures.
I do contemplate what future historians (if our egomaniacal leaders don’t blow up the planet) will write about this profoundly abnormal period in world history. Rational sober minded people will wonder “what were they thinking?”. How did mass delusion sweep across the globe and convince hundreds of millions to believe debt equaled wealth and prosperity could be generated by central bankers printing money at hyper-speed. How could supposedly highly educated financial professionals convince themselves it was rational to pay $900 per share for a company losing hundreds of millions per year?
The foolishness of consumers, corporations, politicians and government bureaucrats is borne out in the chart below. The Federal Reserve created loose monetary policy, started under Greenspan in the 1980s, has convinced Wall Street titans the Fed will always have their back, bailing them out after they take excessive risks and push the financial system to the brink of collapse. The hubris of the ruling oligarchs, exhibited by issuing debt at hyper-speed to “solve” a crisis caused by excessive debt, knows no bounds.
Interest on the national debt is already crowding out spending on real priorities like our infrastructure. Borrowing to pay interest on the debt is a pathway to destruction. An unsustainable trend will not be sustained. It’s just a matter of time.
The masses have been trained through decades in government gulags (aka public schools) to worship the state and propagandized through the corporate media to believe government and the politicians picked for us by men in backrooms are working on our behalf. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Deep State is inhabited by a myriad of corrupt, vile men who are the source of the mischief and disasters being inflicted on honest hard-working people across the land.
Central bankers and their Wall Street puppet masters have been making billions as they blow bubbles, then use their power and control over politicians to shift their losses to the ignorant masses when their bubbles burst. When it happens over and over again, it clearly isn’t due to mistakes or misunderstandings. The pillaging of your wealth, rigged markets, fraud, and buying off the regulatory system is now the standard operating procedure in our outlaw surveillance state.
I’ve been expecting the next shoe to fall in this Fourth Turning for years, but the financial elite have pulled the debt levers to keep the Ponzi scheme alive far longer than a reasonable person would expect. We are only six weeks into 2020 and it seems like a year’s worth of major events have already occurred. The year started with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.
For the next week the world was awash in rhetoric about World War III and possible revolution in Iran. Accusations of Trump using the Wag the Dog method to deflect the negative press from the impeachment hearings were rampant among the half of the country that despises Trump. Soleimani was lauded as a hero by the left and a terrorist by the right. Now, the entire episode seems like ancient history, as more interesting squirrels have arisen for the propaganda media to chase.
The left-wing pundits on MSNBC and CNN are exasperated with the populist admiration by millennials of Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialist. Alzheimer Joe Biden’s candidacy is imploding and Pocahontas Warren is sending desperate smoke signals for her tribe to come to the rescue. The Democratic party is a train wreck in progress.
The left-wing fake news outlets were shrill in the lead up to the 2nd Amendment rights rally in Richmond to protest Governor “Blackface” Northam’s blatant attempt to pass laws which would result in the attempted confiscation of legally owned firearms of citizens of Virginia. Talk of civil war swirled across social media. Northam called out the National Guard. Antifa terrorists threatened to storm the protest.
The displeasure among the left-wing pundits on MSNBC and CNN that thousands of legally armed citizens gathered peacefully to support their Constitutional rights without one incidence of violence was palpable. The left wingers were praying for another Charlottesville, where they could peddle more fake news about Nazis and white supremacists being Trump’s main supporters. Not only did the Richmond protestors act civilly, they actually cleaned up after themselves. Total fail for the liberal elite.
After years of fear mongering by the establishment about Brexit, the UK left the EU on January 31 with absolutely no negative consequences. A blizzard of lies falls from the sky, manufactured by those in power, in order to maintain their power, control and immense wealth. The economic catastrophe Brexit was supposed to create was used by the government apparatchiks to flog and terrify the citizens of the UK. This is par for the course.
As if these myriad of events over the course of a few weeks weren’t enough to keep the world on edge, a potential Black Swan of immense proportions has arisen in China, threatening to initiate a worldwide pandemic. After ten years of expecting something to be the catalyst for the next leg down in this Fourth Turning, I’ve remained skeptical of every new doom and gloom event that comes along, as all previous threats have been neutralized through monetary or political means. But a pertinent quote near the end of Strauss and Howe’s prophecy, certainly seems to apply at this moment in history.
I would say we are already experiencing terrorist anarchy in the Middle East and a virtual high-tech dictatorship through the partnership between the Deep State and the titans of Silicon Valley to surveil everything we say, email, tweet or think. Snowden and Assange have revealed the truth about our military industrial surveillance state, but the masses are too distracted by their iGadgets, Twitter likes, and Facebook fans to notice they live in a technological prison, with the Deep State prison guards ready to stomp on their faces with a boot, forever.
The nuclear exchange is more likely towards the end of this Fourth Turning, if it occurs at all. Mutually assured destruction has deterred countries from utilizing nuclear weapons for the past 70 years, but that doesn’t assure it won’t happen in the next ten years once this Fourth Turning plunges towards its bloody climax.
So that leaves us with incurable plagues. I have to admit this wasn’t on my radar. I’ve been focused on Trump (the Grey Champion), the ongoing Deep State coup against him, potential world conflict originating in the Middle East, and the unending issuance of unpayable debt by the Fed and other central banks to keep this pillaging Ponzi scheme going until the oligarchs have absconded with every dollar of wealth on the planet.
But, seemingly out of nowhere, the Chinese coronavirus has dominated the headlines for the last few weeks as it spreads around the globe, far surpassing the number of cases and deaths caused by SARS in 2003. The number of cases, reported by governmental authorities, is closing in on 70,000, while the number of deaths exceeds 1,600. And these numbers are expanding exponentially by the day.
Because of the virus’s contagiousness, high mortality rate, and resistance to treatment, it has prompted extensive Chinese government action including mandatory quarantines, military forcing people into hospitals/internment camps, and propaganda campaigns to misinform the Chinese public and the international community. Internationally, other countries have sought to limit travel to and from China and implemented extensive screening measures to detect those potentially carrying the virus.
Air travel, to and from China, has been reduced to nothing. The tens of thousands of factories producing the shit Americans don’t need, but must have, sit vacant, as fear and sickness keep workers/slaves trapped in their tiny hovels. The global impact of this shutdown can’t be ignored, as China accounts for 13% of global exports, 5 times as much as during the SARS crisis in 2003.
My default belief is everyone is lying to me. My government, foreign governments, the mainstream media, every politician, every central banker, every religious man, every corporate executive, all investment “experts”, and most of the people on the internet are lying. Trying to decipher who is telling the truth is harder than finding an honest politician, a central banker who dislikes debt, or a Wall Street analyst with a sell recommendation. What I do know for sure is the Chinese government and media are lying.
There is no benefit for them to overestimate the impact of the coronavirus, but downplaying its devastation, deaths, transmit-ability and transmutability are what an overbearing dictatorship does automatically. So, we already know it is worse than the mainstream media outlets are reporting. They incessantly flog the comparison to the annual flu and the tens of thousands of deaths caused by the basic flu each year. This is a pathetic attempt to keep the masses deluded and ignorant. These propaganda campaigns have worked in the past and continue to work on a willfully ignorant people.
On the other side of the fence, we have bloggers, Harvard know-it-alls, alt-media journalists, purveyors of doom who produce articles and posts every day predicting a global pandemic with billions impacted and hundreds of millions of deaths. The fact is doom sells. Most blogs generate advertising revenue based upon visitor counts. Youtubers generate income based upon views. Many of the articles on ZeroHedge about the coronavirus have been viewed between 200,000 and 500,000 times. That is ten to twenty-five times an average article.
When Chris Martenson, Mike Shedlock, Mike Kreiger, and the guys running Zero Hedge are all deeply concerned about the extent of this coronavirus outbreak, I take notice.
When honest financial analysts like Sven Henrich, Jesse, John Hussman, David Stockman, David Rosenberg and Harald Malmgren point out the absurdity, manipulation and extreme overvaluation of our markets, I take heed. Either the coronavirus or ridiculously overbought financial markets could be the sole catalyst for the coming collapse, but when merged into a toxic brew of pathology, ambiguity and fear, they could make 2020 a year to remember in the history of the planet.
Even if the current crisis gets no worse, the global economic impact will be severe, as the worldwide economy was already on the verge of contraction. The reaction of stock markets to the coronavirus epidemic proves they are rigged and being purposefully pumped by the Federal Reserve. When you see Tesla’s market value of $146 billion standing 40% higher than the combined market value of Ford, GM and Chrysler, you realize the Fed has blown the biggest bubble in history. Rational fact-based thinkers realize we are experiencing mass insanity where abnormal behavior is glorified as normal. These episodes of madness and delusion never end well.
Day after day, as the lying Chinese government spins that everything is under control, while brave individuals use social media to prove it isn’t under control, the Federal Reserve continues to say everything is under control, while pumping liquidity into the system as if an emergency crisis situation exists, because it does.
The day after day adrenaline induced new highs in the stock market are a sign of desperation by those in power, attempting to convince the public all is well, while beneath the surface a cancerous rot is eating away at the entrails of this dying patient. If markets weren’t being rigged, they would be discounting the immense economic damage being done to global economies and the massive negative impact on corporate profits. Instead they are propelled to new highs by the Federal Reserve on behalf of their Wall Street owners.
We still have ten and a half months left in this crossroads year of discontent. One way or another, a chain reaction of events will accelerate the permanent tearing of the civic fabric of this country along extreme areas of vulnerability, wantonly ignored or purposefully neglected for decades. Will this coronavirus be the spark that ignites the debt powder-keg sitting atop this world of excess, abnormality, denial and delusions?
Or will it be the re-election of Trump, with the non-acceptance by half the country? Or will Bloomberg buy the presidency after the DNC screws over Bernie again, instigating civil chaos. Will the Deep State pop this stock bubble in the months before the election in a final attempt to derail Trump? Can the oligarchs continue to retain control through further injections of liquidity and more propaganda, or is that well running dry? Even dullards are starting to lose faith in the authorities, so a descent into chaos seems imminent.
I truly don’t know what will transpire during the remainder of 2020 and going forward into 2021, but with our “just in time” global supply chain paralyzed by pathogens, paranoia, and panic, the global economy is going to be impacted severely.
This impact will be felt around the globe, even if it doesn’t turn into a global pandemic. If it does, a global depression would be in the offing.
Even Powell and his electronic printing press couldn’t liquidify our way out of that scenario. With debt at already unsustainable levels, a wave of defaults and bankruptcies would engulf the earth, as financial trust would implode. With global stock markets at the most overvalued point in history, margin debt at all-time highs, no money on the sidelines, and risk-taking behavior at extreme greed levels, the plunge in markets will make 2000 and 2008 look like a walk in the park. A 50% to 60% plummet is a certainty. This mountain of debt will come tumbling down.
A market crash before the November election could lead to a narrow victory by a Sanders or Bloomberg, as an angry populace blames Trump, who has taken full credit for this market bubble. The election of either would just ratchet up the vitriol and dissent roiling across the land. Discontent among the masses would spread around the world, leading politicians to try to distract their people with foreign enemies threatening their freedom. This is when the global war scenario of this Fourth Turning has the highest likelihood of commencing.
We’ve been in the eye of this Fourth Turning hurricane longer than I expected. The deeply ingrained Deep State conspirators have proven more powerful, deceitful, and deranged than I believed. They will not give way without a fight to the death. The threat of them winning is all too real. Their blatant disregard for the Constitution, rule of law and simple decency towards fellow citizens, makes it imperative for courageous, rational, honest, truth seeking Americans to make a stand for the soul of the country.
As we navigate through the storms ahead much will depend upon the bravery, heroism and inspiration provided by a few good men and women, and the fortitude of the many to withstand the brutal tests ahead. The configuration of generations is set. We will either destroy a nation built upon a once noble dream by succumbing to the poison of greed, war and debt peddled by those opposing truth and honor, or we will go down in history as mythlike figures who slew the Goliath of the Deep State. Difficult choices lie ahead. Time to prepare.
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