Towards a New Analytical Framework

At BullBear Trading, we have been anticipating an eventual very long term secular paradigm shift in markets, economics, politics and society since the start of the new long term bull market wave in 2011.  The expectation has been for a phenomenon roughly equivalent in character and significance to that which occurred in the 1929-1949 period, marking a 70 year cycle and functionally equivalent to what Strauss and Howe described as “The Fourth Turning”.  In the 2017-2018 time frame I started to project that the shift would come in 2020.  In January and February 2020 I told subscribers that there were technical signals which warranted caution for bullishly positioned traders and investors.

The secular shift has occurred.  The onset of the last shift was marked by the Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression, and the current shift is marked by the Coronacrisis.  While the past can often inform the present, it’s also a reliable truth that historic cycles tend to rhyme rather than repeat.  Our current “Fourth Turning” is, at a minimum, as significant as the prior comparable shift, and more likely of a higher degree in that it involves a systemic shift and not just a secular shift within the context of the same ongoing system. Now that the specific features and characteristics are becoming clearer and more defined by the day, the time framing and scaling is also becoming more comprehensible.

On the one hand, we may say that the secular shift has occurred, in the sense that a “tipping point” has been reached, from which there is a forward momentum that makes any return to the context of the past paradigm impossible.  On the other hand, we may also say that the shift is a process that is ongoing and yet to be fully completed and consolidated.  Given the accelerating effects of technology and globalization, time is unfolding in shorter, compressed intervals, so that what may have required decades is transpiring within months or weeks.

I think that we can view the 2000-2020 period as both the extinguishing phase of the old paradigm as well as the gestational transitionary phase of the new paradigm.  While the 1929-1949 period was transitional in nature, giving birth to a new secular order in the course of a long labor over a protracted period of time, the birth of our currently newborn world was more sudden and akin to a c-section following a long pregnancy with the infant system violently ripped from History’s womb and spanked sharply into its first shrieking breaths.

Some of the features of the current secular systemic shift:

• Global propaganda-induced fear
• Global public policy panic
• Public policy induced economic collapse
• Economy placed in Central Bank receivership
• De-facto state of political civil war (that threatens to tip into armed conflict)
• De-facto state of asymmetrical, 4th Generation war between the United States and China (threatening to someday tip into actual armed conflict)
• Social destabilization in developed nations
• Certainty of an accelerating trend towards commodification of all consumer and industrial products
• Certainty of an accelerating trend towards online and digital commerce, exchange, learning and socialization
• Certainty of an accelerating trend towards robotization and automation of labor
• Certainty of the accelerating implementation of societal, political and economic Artificial Intelligence management systems
• Certainty of the majority of the population transitioned to dependency on various forms of Universal Basic Income

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The Secular Systemic Shift to Technocracy: Towards a New Analytical Framework