Are We In The 4th Turning?

November 2, 2020 

* Currencies & metals rally on Friday… 

* Gold looks ready to resume its upward climb… 

Good Day… And a Marvelous Monday to you… This will be a shortened week, with only today and tomorrow on the docket for a Pfennig… Wednesday morning I head to the hospital for an echocardiogram. It’s been a year since they did one, so I’m on the docket for one on Wednesday, and then on Thursday, it’s my monthly visit to my oncologist… That was some sad news this past weekend that 007, James Bond, had passed away… Sean Connery certainly had a full life, living to age 90… To me, he was the best to play the role of James Bond, in which he did it 7 times, and all were successful movies… My beloved Tigers took one on the chin to the Florida Gators on Saturday night… Speaking of Saturday night, we had more trick-or-treaters this year than we’ve had the last two years combined! The Strawberry Alarm Clock greets me this morning with their song: Incense & Peppermint…  “Who cares what games we choose?   Little to win but nothin’ to lose” A great 60’s song!

Tomorrow is election day… And one of the things I keep reading about is that the outcome of the election probably won’t be known for a few days, maybe even a week…  Well, they have until Jan. 20th, when the inauguration has to take place… So, what this is going to do is put an “unknown” into the markets… And class, what have I taught you through the years, about unkowns?   That’s right, traders don’t’ like them, and usually unknowns like this could cause major upheaval in the markets… But not to worry, I’m firm believer that Gold is set to rally big time in the coming days… And if I’m wrong about the election results taking a few days, Gold will still be in the batter’s box ready to hit the long ball… Let’s hope that the election results don’t take days… Remember what that was like after the Bush/ Gore election race?  It made the U.S. look like a 3rd world country, with the hanging chads, and legal proceedings and how long it took to finally announce a winner…

OK… So, the currencies and metals both rallied on Friday, while stocks got sold like funnel cakes at a state fair… We could be seeing a crumbling of the outrageous values in the stocks, as I’ve seen something the last couple days last week, that is a complete reversal of what was going on with stocks… What had been going on is that individual stocks would rise in the face of bad earnings… And last week I saw a couple of stocks that had good earnings get sold… Something is going on here, folks… I sure hope you have your stop orders in place…

Enough on the stock jockeys’ problems…  Non dollar investors have had enough of their own problems to worry about lately… So… Gold rose $11.30 on Friday, to close at $1,879.60, and Silver rose 41-cents to $23.74… I was listening to my fave writer, and speaker, Grant Williams and his podcast that he does with Stephanie Pomboy, of Macro Mavens, on Friday, and they had the Gold legendary John Hathaway on to talk about Gold… I learned a new word during the podcast… Grant Williams called John Hathaway a “doyen”…  For those of you who were like me and had to look up the word, it means: “ the most respected or prominent person in a particular field.” And just from listening to John Hathaway talk, I had to agree! 

John Hathaway didn’t  get into talking about the price manipulators and instead preferred to talk about how this move backward in Gold was due, and now Gold is ready to move higher once again…  So… there… a different point of view, for you….  You can find Grant Williams podcasts on Apple podcasts…

In James Rodgers’ book Hot Commodities, he has a chart that lists the Bull Markets for Commodities throughout history… And if you average them all up, the average Bull Market for Commodities lasts between 17-20 years… This new Bull Market for Gold (a commodity) began in 2015…  So, we’ve got a long way to go… It’s too bad the price manipulators don’t read books like that, because then they would see that they are fighting a losing battle! 

Ok, last week a dear reader sent me a note, and asked me if I knew where he could find data for M2… Unfortunately, the answer is no… So, I rely on different sites to give me ideas what M2 is doing… M2 represents money supply growth, the amount of paper dollars floating throughout the economy, and has grown by about 30% this year.  Now, before there were price manipulators, you could almost trace the movement in Gold with that of M2… With that in mind, recall last week when I said, “Gold should be at $2,500 right now?” Well, if you look at M2 increase, that’s exactly where Gold should be given its historical relationship with M2… 

Unfortunately, these days, these days I sit on cornerstone, and count the time in quarter tones to ten… My friend, don’t confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them….   Ahhh, one of my fave Jackson Browne songs this morning, of course he sings better than I do, but then I don’t care… I sing because I love to sing… And before the radiation on my jaw tore up my mouth, and throat, back in 2011, I used to have a pretty good voice… These days? Not so much!

Anyway, what I was saying before I went all rock-n-roll on you, was that unfortunately, these days, there ARE price manipulators…  But one of these days, their games they play with Gold & Silver, will be brought to a halt… And then…. In the words of Buzz Lightyear… “To Infinity and beyond!”

Well, the euro found a way to add about ½-cent on Friday in the fave of all that dollar buying last week… But I doubt the good times for the euro are going to be something that we continue to talk about, because The European Central Bank (ECB) may have left rates unchanged at their last meeting, I doubt that relative calm is not going to last, and the ECB will be going more negative with interest rates at their next meeting…

Negative rates haven’t hurt the Japanese yen, or Swiss franc… yet that is… So, you kind of see what the ECB is thinking, right? “if The Japanese and Swiss can keep investors confused, then we can too, and if the Bank of England is going negative with rates soon, we will be in good company”…  But what they aren’t thinking about is the unintended consequences… I told ou my feeling about negative rates in last Monday’s Pfennig, so I won’t rehash that, except to say, “Please do not allow our Cartel, I mean Fed Reserve, to go negative here in the U.S. …

So… either the dollar bugs go into hiding for a while, to allow the euro and other currencies to rally based simply on dollar weakness, or… The dollar bugs hold steady Eddie…  I’m thinking that with all the unknowns and currency printing that the dollar bugs are in trouble… But I honestly don’t have a strong feeling either way here… So you’ve got that going for you! HA!

The overnight markets have kept things pretty steady Eddie for the currencies, but… Gold had gained $9.70, and Silver has gained 30-cents in the early trading today, adding to their Friday gains, so it appears that my thoughts on Gold this week are coming to fruition? 

The U.S. Data Cupboard had the Sept prints of Consumer Income and Spending on Friday… Both saw gains in Sept from August, and that had me scratching my bald head… I get the Spending data, it was back to school time in Sept (Instead of August, because of the delays in starting school) but the Income gains? When the Gov’t’s mental giants were sending out checks to the unemployed that were greater than the money the unemployed made, I could see where there would be income gains… But now?  Oh, well, it is what it is, right? 

This week’s Data Cupboard will be busy with data prints like the ISM manufacturing index, Factory Orders, the ADP Employment Report, the Weekly Initial Jobless Claims, and finally on Friday, the Jobs Jamboree… So, as I see things, the election results will be up in the air, and that will dominate the markets’ collective minds, not the data… 

For What It’s Worth…  Back in 2002, I received a Christmas present from our Marketing Director, David Galland… It was Stauss & Howe’s 4th Turning book… I thought, at first, I guess there’s something in here that he wants me to learn…  But it wasn’t that at all… The book written in 1997, told of the 80-year cycles that bring about things… Anyway, this is a long article that can be found here : https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/10/22/fourth-turning-election-year-crisis-3/

Or, here’s your snippet: “The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. 

I read The Fourth Turning in 2006, after seeing it described in John Mauldin and Doug Casey’s newsletters as an uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life. Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.

As a student of history, the theory spoke to me. I have been writing articles since 2009, using the Fourth Turning as a guide to interpreting what has been happening and what might happen as this crisis period accelerates towards its violent culmination. The quotes above perfectly capture exactly what has happened since this crisis began in September 2008, with the Fed/Wall Street created financial collapse. The existing social order is disintegrating, but they are willing to destroy the country rather than relinquish their wealth, power and control.

Strauss & Howe identified the core elements of this Crisis as debt, civic decay, and global disorder. No one can argue the severe distress engulfing the nation and the world traces its origins to these core elements, with the catalyst for this Crisis being the 2008 central banker manufactured financial collapse. Nothing has been normal since 2008. And 2008’s epic implosion was driven by the disastrous financial, political and military decisions implemented by the puppets of the Deep State from 2000 onward, with the Federal Reserve obligingly creating bubble after bubble as the “solution” to the previous bubble.

And now we are here again, in the midst of the greatest bubble in the history of mankind. A bubble of willful ignorance. The obliviousness of most Americans to the danger awaiting them is akin to the day before Fort Sumpter was bombed, the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked, or the dinosaurs unaware of a giant meteor rushing towards the planet and about to transform their future in a challenging way.

Real hardship has beset the land, for those not in the .1% or Deep State lackeys being rewarded for propagating mistruths, outright lies, fear, and propaganda on behalf of their oligarch benefactors. These apparatchiks mainly consist of corrupt politicians, central bank lackeys, mainstream media hacks, neocon warmongers, surveillance state traitors, and big pharma captured health “experts”. The severe distress does involve class, race, nation and empire, but most of the distress has been artificially created by those pulling the strings – Bernays’ invisible government manipulating the masses.”

Chuck again… Remember this book was written in 1997… And I thought I had a feather in my cap when I  was the first to talk about the housing bubble in 2003!

Market Prices 11/2/20: American Style: A$ .7040,  kiwi .6627, C$ .7521, euro 1.1645, sterling 1.2929, Swiss $1.0886, European Style: rand 16.2564, krone 9.5530, SEK 8.9000,  forint 314.50,  zloty 3.9521,   koruna 23.3026, RUB 79.36, yen 104.69, sing 1.3655, HKD 7.7518, INR 74.41, China 6.6830, peso 21.24, BRL 5.7398,  Dollar Index 94.04,  Oil $35.00,   10-year .85%, Silver $24.04, Platinum $855.00, Palladium $2,232.00, and Gold… $1.889.30

That’s it for today…  The sun finally came out on Saturday, and the temps were a bit warmer, which allowed me to sit outside and begin to read my new Jack Reacher book…  We’re having our first freeze of this season, as it is 28 outside this morning… BRRR….  The gout has attacked my left elbow once again, and since I use my left arm to hold my cane to walk, I can barely get around this morning… if you’ve ever had the gout, you know how painful it is… I take a medicine that’s supposed to keep my uric acid in check, but from time to time it fails to do its job…  Ok, this will be a busy week for me…  Have you made your plans to vote tomorrow?  I voted early, so don’t allow the thought of long lines at the voting venues, deter you… Get out and Vote!  Earth, Wind & Fire take us to the finish line today with their song: September…  This song gets me dancing in my chair… I hope you have a Marvelous Monday, and Please Be Good To Yourself!

Chuck Butler