Unraveling Two Decades of Greed

Jim Quinn – Lew Rockwell

We are currently in the midst of a Fourth Turning. This twenty year Crisis began during the 2005–2008 timeframe with the collapse of the housing bubble and subsequent repercussions on the worldwide financial system. It is progressing as expected, with the financial crisis deepening and leading to tensions across the world. It will eventually morph into military conflict, as all prior Fourth Turnings have. The progression from High to Awakening through the Unraveling took from 1946 until 2006. The most treacherous period of the Saeculm is upon us. The intensity of a Crisis is very much dependent upon how a country and its citizens prepare for the Crisis during the final years of the Unraveling. The last Unraveling period in U.S. history from 1984 through 2005 was symbolized by Boomer greed, materialism, debt and selfishness. When Michael Lewis graduated from Princeton University in 1985 and joined Salomon Brothers, I’m sure he didn’t realize that he would end up book-ending the Unraveling period in his two best-selling books about Wall Street.

In his latest book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Lewis seems bewildered by the fact that his first book Liar’s Poker, written in 1989, didn’t dissuade college students from pursuing careers on Wall Street. If Lewis had read The Fourth Turning by Strauss & Howe when it was published in 1997, he would have understood why the people on Wall Street couldn’t change. The generations were just acting out their part in a grand never ending cycle. Lewis explains what he thought would happen:

“I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous – which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.”

Michael Lewis was a 24-year-old Generation X Ivy League graduate who ended up on Wall Street at the outset of the Unraveling. He was flabbergasted by how clueless youngsters could pretend to know what they were doing while taking home phenomenal amounts of money. He was sure it would end in short order. But he was wrong. It built to a decadent crescendo two decades later. It took longer than he expected, but the rebellion is beginning now:

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