Behold the 80-year Cycle Factors That Result In Depression and War

Cycles are a part of life. The seasons move in cycles, the stock market moves in cycles, even the length of women’s skirts are subject to cyclic patterns. So pay close heed to an article by Thom Hartmann who is warning us about the 80-year cycle between the Civil War and the end of the Republican Great Depression. Your thought may be the same as mine, “Why 80 years?” There may be larger reasons for that length of a cycle but a simple one is that in eighty years the people who made the mistakes the first time are gone and can’t warn about the things that are taking place again.

One thing I find compelling about that argument is that my WWII friends are all gone and I absolutely guarantee you for the nth time that if the men and women I knew from that era were here to see the madness we witness daily, the Nazi salutes, the kidnapping of grad students off the streets, deportation and incarceration of innocent people in foreign prisons, everything which is normal nowadays, they wouldn’t stand for it for one minute. This is not what they fought — and so many of their comrades died — for. Hartmann starts out with the premise, “history warns us: every major economic crash has led to a world war.” We look to be heading for exactly that between Trump’s “corruption, debt, and tariffs.”

In three weeks, on my birthday May 7th, it’ll be exactly 80 years since Germany signed terms of surrender at the headquarters of US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Reims, France.

That year, 1945, also signaled the official end of the Republican Great Depression. And May 7 of this year may well signal the beginning of the Second Republican Great Depression, the fourth major economic crash in our history. Troublingly, every one of the prior three financial crises also tripped off a major war.

As Neal Howe points out in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, it was roughly 80 years or four generations from the Credit Crisis of 1772 which provoked the American Revolutionary War until the Panic of 1857, which set the stage for the Civil War.

Another 80 years passed between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of the Republican Great Depression (which triggered WWII) and May 7, 1945. And here we are, exactly 80 years later, on the verge of another depression and possibly a third world war.

Howe posits that 80 years is how long it takes for the generation that made the mistakes that produced the last depression to die off and thus not be available to warn about those same errors being repeated. And depressions almost always lead to wars.

(While recessions typically last months to a year and involve modest declines in stocks and increases in unemployment, depressions typically last years and cause massive losses with unemployment as high as a third of all Americans.)

But it’s not just the passage of eight decades that indicates the Second Republican Great Depression — and possibly America’s next Great War — is upon us. For that, we find the same conservative greed and corruption that provoked the Credit Crisis of 1772, the Panic of 1857, and the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.

All three were caused by wealthy speculators interacting with a corrupt administration (in 1772 it was the Brits), which is exactly what we’re seeing again today in the most corrupt administration in US history.

Give Trump and his corrupt cronies millions in campaign cash or purchases of his digital “coins” and he’ll give you and your industry an exception to his tariffs; hell, give him enough money to win an election and he’ll even let you take over and then gut the American government and fire all the people conducting investigations into you and your companies.

Hartmann then goes on to describe a scenario which strikes terror in my heart, personally. Advertisers are pulling back. Advertising and the economy go hand in glove. In a healthy economy where people are buying and selling, advertising does well. You all remember, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” and other major ad campaigns that sold many billions of units of Coca-Cola. That’s in a healthy economy. Hartmann describes a recent discussion with the ad agency that sells spots for his radio show telling him “that consumers are themselves pulling back — anticipating a combined recession and tariff-driven inflation — meaning advertising will produce smaller revenue returns.”

We here survived an ad recession on the internet in 2021. Advertisers got it into their heads that there would be a COVID-driven recession and it never came. Yes, there was a global recession but America had a “soft landing.” It was nowhere of the severity that advertisers were dreaming up. But dream they did and media outlets were the worse off for their nightmares. The soft landing happened under Joe Biden. With the maniac in charge now, don’t look for anything other than crash and burn because that’s Trump’s style. He loves the chaos. And he doesn’t care about the consequences.

Meanwhile, both JPMorgan and Wells Fargo tell The Financial Times (for an article titled (“Warning lights flash for US consumer strength as credit defaults rise”) that they’re seeing significant and concerning defaults across the system among their credit card holders. And tourism to America, which is a massive industry representing about 4% of our GDP, has collapsed.

Today. Now. In other words, it’s already begun.

Since consumer spending drives about 80 percent of America’s GDP, this is a disastrous turn of events that feeds on itself: As people buy less to build up their savings, companies suffer from lower sales. That causes them to lay off workers, who then can’t buy anything, further deepening the recession.

China isn’t taking Trump’s little trade war lightly, either; they’re right now crippling the UK steel industry (which they largely own because the conservative Boris Johnson administration stupidly sold it to the Chinese) in “an act of hybrid warfare designed to punish the UK and Donald Trump” as the headline in the Express cites.

And forget about tariffs; the Chinese government is blocking “direct exports of major U.S. commodities including beef, poultry and liquified natural gas through an array of bureaucratic blocks and tricky third-party sales deals.” Additionally, they’ve blocked the export of vital rare earth minerals we need to manufacture chips, displays, and advanced weaponry.

The goal is to cripple America economically in response to Trump’s threats and bluster, and it’s working.

Most concerning, though, is what’s happening to the bond markets and the dollar; this is where the signs don’t just point to recession but possibly a Second Republican Great Depression that could explode unemployment and last years.

This is not Chicken Little screaming here. This is all quite plausible. Remember that the goal of the current administration is to financially enrich both Trump and his billionaire boys’ club buddies. There is no other. They will prosper while the rest of the country goes down to deprivation.

Mark Carney made the comment last week that “if America will no longer lead, Canada will.” And Canada did. Carney was the head of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, which is our equivalent of The Fed, and he knows a thing or two about the world economy. Canada is not like the United States, where an abject moron can get elected to her highest post. Carney came up with the notion of forcing Trump’s hand with the sell off of U.S. Treasury bonds.

About $8.5 trillion of the US’ $36 trillion national debt is held by foreign governments (as treasuries), including $350 billion by Canada, $1 trillion by Japan, an estimated $1 trillion by China, and between $1.5 and $2 trillion by the EU.

If they were to coordinate the process of dumping their bonds, he reportedly suggested, it would flood the market with US bonds and make it harder for the American Treasury Department to sell new debt issues, forcing us to increase the rate of interest we pay.

This would drive up US mortgages (which just jumped above 7%!) and other credit, make it harder for companies to finance expansion and new operations, while increasing the $1+ trillion annual interest cost to the US government to fund our own debt. The result, if sustained over even a few months, could be devastating.

And, sure enough, it appears that’s exactly what they did this past week when bond yields shot up, forcing Trump to put a 90-day pause on most of his tariffs.

On top of that, the dollar is falling at the same time bond yields are rising, something that hasn’t happened since the last Republican Great Depression.

The handwriting is on the wall here. The last time we were having this level of conversation was in 2008 when the government had to bail out Wall Street. And all this is going on while Congress is trying to pass a debt bill which would extend the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, which would be used to pay Elon Musk and the other billionaires in Trump’s cabinet their $4.5 trillion tax gift. And look at this.

Republicans are entirely responsible for this loaded debt gun that’s now being put to our heads. Reagan’s tax gifts to billionaires (which is still in effect) have cost America at least $20 trillion; Bush’s have cost us around $6 trillion, plus another $6 trillion for the two illegal wars he lied us into to win the 2004 election; and Trump’s last tax cut cost us an estimated $5 trillion. That’s $37 trillion, and our national debt right now only stands at $36.22 trillion.

Republicans are Robin Hood in reverse, it’s the rich stealing from everybody, when they have plenty and don’t need anymore. But steal they must. Greed is in their DNA. And so is a firesale mentality.

Batten down your financial hatches and get ready; this is going to be rough for everybody except the morbidly rich, who are rubbing their hands with gleeful anticipation at the upcoming “buying opportunity of the century” to acquire everything from small companies to real estate to stocks, all on sale at massive, depression-era-level discounts.

That is the set up. Trump has done this many times. He runs a company or companies into the ground and then declares bankruptcy. And now he’s looking to do it to the United States.

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Now that I’ve scared you to death, yes, I’ll ask for money. We’re going to have to get through this together. I won’t let the blog go under any circumstances while I’m on this side of the grass. I believe we can survive Trump and such is my goal. Thank you. Ursula

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