The Fourth Turning: Things Stay The Same Until They Don’t, or, Markets, Money Printing, and Earthquake Faults

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” – The Empire Strikes Back

I always felt disappointed when I lost a model rocket as a kid.  I guess I have thrust issues. (all memes as found)

Am I the only one who feels like the Fed© has been auditioning to play Darth Vader® in the Disney™ Star Wars:  Sith on Ice cast since about 2008?

We’re well into the Fourth Turning® now, and Strauss and Howe laid it out clear as day:  crisis, chaos, and a whole lot of “what the hell just happened?”  And boy, did they ever deliver.

• War grinding on in Ukraine.
• Fresh conflict kicking off with Iran – airstrikes, oil price jitters, the works.
• Tariffs flying like confetti at a parade nobody wanted.
• February hits and we lose 92,000 jobs just like that.

Yet somehow the stock market just, well, keeps going.  The Dow® is still near all-time highs, but it’s less than 50,000 so I guess it’s okay to ask Pam Bondi questions about Epstein now.  The NASDAQ© is shrugging off bad news like it’s just another Wednesday.  Prices are steady.  It’s almost impressive.

Almost.

Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: this steadiness isn’t natural.  I think it’s juiced. Freshly printed money, courtesy of the Federal Reserve® and its never-ending balance sheet expansion.  Tectonic shifts are happening everywhere:  geopolitics, energy, labor.

Pa Wilder always told me to not spend too much on headphones.  That’s sound advice.

Wall Street acts like it’s business as usual.  That’s not resilience.  That’s a managed decline wearing a happy face.

Think about it.  The real economy?  People are cutting back.  Groceries are heavier on the wallet, so families skip the steak and finance Encharitos© for six months from Taco Bell®.  Credit card balances are climbing while actual stuff bought is shrinking.  The money printing isn’t creating wealth it’s masking the fact that the purchasing power is evaporating for regular people on the things they need to buy all the time.

But cracks are showing elsewhere.

BlackRock™.  You know, the biggest asset manager on the planet.  Just recently they slammed the door on their own shareholders trying to pull money out of a $26 billion private credit fund.  Redemption requests hit 9.3%, so they capped it and only let a fraction of that cash out.

“Sorry, billionaires, no soup for you this quarter.  Live like a wagie and crowdfund that Nachos Bellgrande©.”

Things are so tight that the Vatican is allowing tithes to be paid via PrayPal®.

This isn’t some glitch.  It’s happened before with other funds, and it’s spreading.  When the biggest players start gating withdrawals, it’s not because everything’s fine and dandy.  It’s because the underlying assets are illiquid and selling them fast would reveal prices that don’t match the fairy-tale valuations on the books.

Translation: the music’s still playing, but the chairs are getting scarce.  Where does this end?

Well, first off, it doesn’t end. Not really. Not in the neat, tidy way the TV experts promise.  Markets and prices, and whole economies work a lot like faults deep in the Earth’s crust.  Stress builds up slowly for years, sometimes decades, with hardly any movement you can see on the surface.  The tectonic plates stay locked together.

Everything looks calm and stable.  Then one day the pressure becomes too great and it all snaps like a 1980s postal worker, an 8.3 on the Richter scale.  The ground rips open and the entire landscape shifts twenty feet in seconds while people are shaking like a stripper in a vat of melting ice cream just trying not to fall down.  I guess that was an oddly specific metaphor wrapped in another metaphor.

Anyway.

Sam told the orphans they should play Grand Theft Auto® so they can be wanted.

When the shaking finally stops, things don’t go back to where they were.  The new normal is permanently different.  And when we’re talking asset prices in our funny money dollars, that shift is almost always higher than before.  Markets do the exact same dance.

Silver prices?  Steady as the rocks they were mined out of for years at a time.  Stress builds quietly.  Then inflation, crisis, or panic hits and the price explodes upward and the new resting level is higher than before.

Same story in 2008-2011: $9 to $49, overshot, pulled back, never returned to the old lows.

Gold does the same dance.  Fixed at $35 an ounce until Nixon slammed the gold window shut in 1971.  Then the printing started and it flew to $800, crashed to $300, but the next plateau was higher.

2000s bull run led to $1,900 gold, then a pullback, then new records above $3,000 and climbing. Each release of pressure overshoots, then settles higher when measured in our funny money.

Silver and gold and assets are telling us the story.

The money printers are holding the fault lines, sort of.  The pressure underneath is still growing every day as silver and gold and A.I. bubble.  Meanwhile, debt, demographics, global realignment, and the whole Fourth Turning stew.

An oracle once told me I would hit my leg at school.  She was right.  It was my desk to knee.

If I were giving advice to a young person starting out today, here’s at least part of what I’d say:

• Buy stuff that’s real. Physical silver and gold, every single year, with at least part of whatever you save. Doesn’t have to be a ton. An ounce of gold here, a few ounces of silver there. Stack it. Hold it. Treat it like insurance, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
• Land if you can swing it and cover the taxes and upkeep dirt doesn’t print more of itself and if it blows up at least you own a hole in the ground.
• Stocks? Sure, invest in them too, as long as there’s still a stock market that isn’t just a government-sponsored casino.
• Diversify, but never forget: paper assets only work while the system that backs the paper holds together.
• The real key? Build skills.  Learn to produce something useful.  Grow food.  Fix things.  Trade with neighbors.  Get out of debt that isn’t productive.
• Avoid crowds. Get out of cities if you’re still there:  a year too soon beats thirty seconds too late.

Because here’s the truth nobody on CNBC® wants to say out loud:  the managed decline might buy time, but it doesn’t buy forever.  The money printing is papering over cracks that are getting wider.  When the next quake comes, and it will, gold and silver won’t just hold value.  They’ll ratchet higher again, overshooting on the way up, then settling at a new, higher plateau.  It’s default, but just enough to bleed you a little.

It’s the same pattern every cycle.  History’s a harsh teacher, and she doesn’t offer extra credit.

The Fourth Turning isn’t here to be fair. It’s here to reset.  The people who see the pattern coming, who stack real assets quietly every year, who prepare instead of panic are the ones who come out the other side with options.

There’s no way that this can go bad, right?

The rest? They’ll be financing their next Taco Bell® run on a maxed-out card while wondering why the market “suddenly” stopped cooperating.

Things stay the same, until they don’t.

Stack accordingly. And pray the deal doesn’t get altered any further.

Disclaimer:  I write funny things, and you should know that by now so this isn’t investment advice.  I do have positions in silver and gold, because I’m not completely allergic to reality.  Do your own homework. Talk to a professional who isn’t trying to sell you the next hot ETF® or his children.