The last couple of years I have been tracking Elliot Wave, which makes long term investment recommendations, based on a studying cycles, of various time scales (fractal).
Both The Fourth Turning by WILLIAM STRAUSS, NEIL HOWE, and Elliot Wave theory are predicting a major depression, covering most of the next ten or twenty years.
When I posted this Presidential Election Maps 1940 - 2000 thread, I left off the period before 1940, to keep the post to a reasonable size (in terms of mental effort to read), and to keep it within the lifetime of a decent number of readers.
However, I suspect that the period from 1900 to 1930 may more closely resemble the period from 1980 to 2110. A dynamic leader, reshaping this country, Teddy Roosevelt, was president from 1900 to 1908. He was a Republican. I imagine that the scope of his impact on America resembles Reagan's. After his terms, there was a tendency for Republicans to win the White House for some time, except in years when a strong Democrat (Wilson) opposed a weaker Republican candidate, with a third party candidate to split the vote.
This continued for some time, through the roaring twenties that perhaps corresponds to the boom of the nineties, until the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression in the early thirties. The Republicans were in office then, consecutive terms of Harding, Hoover and Coolidge.
The Republicans were blamed for the depression, and blown out of office, to be replaced by that champion of the people and the fireside chat, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Democrats held the White House for the next 32 years, and vastly expanded the scope of the Federal Government during that time. We have later learned that some of FDR's closest advisors were Communists.
My fear is that we are going that way again.
George W. Bush held off the major economic downturn I was predicting, with his aggressive tax policies, and with Greenspan's aggressive interest rate reductions. Bush's focus this term includes five major initiatives that might continue to hold off the depression I continue to predict:
I do not wish to learn of Hillary's plans for expanding the scope of the Federal Government.
Nor do I welcome her fire side chats into my living room.
But even if we avoid that Marxist, we will have a period of another ten years or so, in which we risk some other Leftist using a major economic depression to gain far too much power.
Even now we are seeing the dollar weaken again. It has been the key to holding up our economy and stock market, and financing our national debt, these last four years. Waves of currency devaluations, around the world, could usher in another Great Depression.
I have been out of Gold, since January 1 of this year, except for an exquisitely timed three weeks in late May. It might be time to get back in. When the dollar goes down, dollar denominated gold goes up, almost lock step.