Signs of the Times

There is a fascinating aspect of living life that I find almost indescribable. Seemingly disparate events can present themselves to the observer in an apparently random fashion and dovetail into a piece of truly unique and important information in a way not one man in a million would suspect would happen.

For example: Eric King interviewed Robert Prechter several months ago, and some fleeting mention was made of skirt lengths, hair styles and other aspects of a study Prechter has pioneered called Socionomics. Taken by themselves, these offhand references were of little use initially. It was not until Eric King later interviewed Jim Sinclair and was questioning him about the Hunt brothers that something unique and perhaps highly important began to take shape in my thoughts. Most notable was a reference to Bunker Hunt’s interview given before his death in which he had been questioned involving he and his brother’s quest to supposedly corner the silver market.

It had never occurred to me until Eric King’s interview that it had not been the Hunt's intention to corner the silver market. I had always assumed that, as Jim Sinclair had pointed out many times, the Hunt's big mistake was not having an exit strategy. It was not until this interview that it occurred to me that the Hunt Brothers did not have an exit strategy by design. There was to be no exit. The dollar was going to disappear, and they just wanted to have the "next" money that was going to come into use when the dollar was gone. They weren't playing a game. They were planning on how to survive in a post-dollar world.

Eric King made one very important and penetrating point during the course of this interview. He made reference to the fact that perhaps the Hunts got it right, but had just gotten it right too early, that the wheel was to take another tern, so to speak, and come back around again at a later date to bring the US dollar back to the crisis point. In other words, what Paul Volcker and his men at the Federal Reserve had done by raising interest rates to strengthen the dollar did nothing to strengthen the dollar fundamentally, but simply worked to buy the dollar more time, a stalling tactic essentially, before its inevitable destruction that would, by necessity, follow.

It was here that yet another seemingly disparate reference point suddenly came into play. I began to consider my personal experiences working, as a physician, with terminal cancer patients. I had for years come into contact with such patients almost daily in my work. One simple truth I have learned over time involving cancer is that the longer the disease stays in the body, the more difficult it is to throw it into remission with the use of radiation and chemotherapy. I have also come to know that for every remission, the inevitable return is typified by greater virulence, greater pain and greater difficulty in achieving remission again.

If this brush with death that the Hunt brothers misjudged and Eric King referred to as “a turn of the wheel” could be compared to a cancer scenario, then the inflation and dollar weakness seemingly tamed by Paul Volcker’s efforts at the Fed would not only return, but would return in a much more dangerous and difficult, perhaps impossible-to-stop incarnation. It would return long after the Hunt Brothers were gone, but it would have to return.

I, for one, am a believer in signs and interpreting signs. Those who study nature and even those who do not, understand that certain types of winds signal the likely coming of a storm. Thunder and lightning have meaning, too. A disappearance of clouds, a change in pressure or temperature, even the songs of birds can be interpreted to mean things that perhaps signal the onset of certain meteorological circumstances. Perhaps Prechter is correct in his assumptions, and it is also so involving the behavior of human beings.

Perhaps the seventies were a time when we were closer to the end of the dollar and all the social upheavals that that would have entailed. And if so, what "signs" were there to be seen of the impending disease? Like howling dogs before a storm that mysteriously passed without rain, what howling sounds were humans making with the impending dollar collapse that never happened, with the turn in the wheel that allowed us to narrowly escape our collective fate? Can Socioeconomics provide us with a clue? Was there perhaps a reason why the seventies were a time of such grubbiness, of long hair and free love, of Hippies and riots and protests?

A friend of mine showed me his high school yearbook years ago (He was graduated in 1976) from one of the more prestigious Northern California High Schools, a 170 year old Jesuit Institution. The yearbook included many photographs of graduating seniors posing in photos with beer bottles and beer-drinking paraphernalia. Everything in that yearbook, just like everything around it during that time, was a sloppy mess.

Something happened in the 80’s and 90's, however, a twenty year reprieve occurred. People got cleaner. Not as clean as in the post-war 1950's, but cleaner, nonetheless. Hair was long but not so long, sloppiness went out, nerdiness and preppiness and similar less grungy styles came in, even if for only awhile.

The wheel was turning away from disaster. But it remained a wheel. It would have to turn back.

Look at what has happened to us today. Grunge has returned, spawning new and sloppier musical forms to go with it. Where Led Zeppelin was loud and defiant, at least it was artistic. Now even that has been lost. Now all music, rap, rock, pop, is melding into one new form of loud, sloppy puke-music. The sloppiness is returning and with a vengeance. Hair not only is getting longer again, but men and women are tattooing themselves, piercing their bodies. We are seeing things that the children of the seventies would have considered barbaric. Sexual promiscuity has not only lost its stigma, it’s encouraged. Women kissing women, men kissing men. Children kissing children. The disease of sloppiness and carelessness that went into remission has returned to haunt us and in a much more deadly form.

Perhaps Eric King was right, and perhaps the Hunt brothers did have it right, just too soon. They wouldn’t be the first denizens of history to miss making a fortune with the right idea at the wrong time. But what if the wheel is finally turning back to where it was? Are we seeing the socioeconomic telltale signs that something potentially ominous is about to unfold again. And when it does, what chemotherapy will the Federal Reserve be able to throw this time at it to save the dying dollar? Could this really be the dollar endgame?