Via TheBurningPlatform.com - November 13, 2025

This is an introduction to The Fourth Turning. Over the years, our Administrator has done an incredibly outstanding job authoring Fourth Turning articles. So why post this? Well, our Newbies may not have read them. Also, there are a few things mentioned here that seem to be new. Lastly, this is excellent writing. (FYI … the author of this piece is probably 99% in agreement with what our Admin writes.)

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The Darkest Hours Are Before The Dawn

The Fourth Turning doesn’t reveal itself gradually—it crashes over you all at once when you finally start to see the pattern. Writing this piece felt like trying to grab sand in my hands; every attempt to contain one aspect of the transformation led to three more slipping through my fingers. What you’ll read here is my best effort to trace the contours of something far larger than any individual could possibly comprehend.

We’re all in the same boiling water now—the Fourth Turning’s Crisis that began with Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008—but whether we emerge hardened or dissolved depends entirely on what we’re made of. We’re now deep in the Fourth Turning, the winter of this historical cycle, and if you think the past few years have been chaotic?

You ain’t seen nothing yet!

History doesn’t move in straight lines. It breathes, it pulses, it turns through seasons as predictable as winter following autumn. William Strauss and Neil Howe discovered this pattern in 1997. Like clockwork, every 80 years or so – a human lifetime, America faces an existential crisis that threatens to tear apart everything we thought permanent. We’ve been through this three times before, and we’re going through it again right now.

Strauss and Howe predicted in 1997 that around 2005, some spark would ignite a Crisis mood. They suggested it might be “as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party”. They nailed it. The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t just another recession—it was the moment the post-World War II global order began its death spiral. Lehman Brothers’ September 15, 2008 collapse marked more than a bank failure; it marked the beginning of the end of trust in the system itself.

I’ve started following these markets around 2007, and what happened after that particular collapse was unprecedented. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet exploded from $900 billion to $4 trillion in a matter of years, then to $9 trillion during COVID. The national debt, which stood at $10 trillion in 2008, has now reached $37 trillion as of August 2025. We didn’t solve the crisis—we papered it over with printed money and kicked the can down the road. We didn’t solve the problem—we made it exponentially worse. As someone who tracks gold markets, I can tell you with increasing clarity: the people who actually understand money are quietly converting their paper promises into something that can’t be printed.

The response to 2008 revealed . . .

[SNIP]