Are we heading down the road towards another Great Depression? There are many signs that would make it seem so… The dollar is losing its worth while the price of gas goes through the roof. I now believe that we will see gas prices at or near $5.10 by the end of the summer. Even more disturbing is the fragile state of the Middle East. Something is going to give, and it isn’t going to be pretty. Tom Merritt, a Cnet editor, has made a insetting observation, and I think he may be onto something.

…you can see some historic cycles by looking at things that chracterise certain decades.

1820s – War/Recovery (If anything recovery from 1814 but tenuous)
1830s – Promise (Railroad construction booms)
1840s – Turmoil (Mexican-American War)
1850s – Depression (1850s depression, Bleeding Kansas)
1860s – War/Recovery (Civil War, Transcontinental railroad, death of Lincoln)
1870s – Promise (Telephone, light bulb, phonograph, reconstruction)
1880s – Turmoil (electricity, cars, new imperialism)
1890s – Depression (Panic of 1893, depression)
1900s – War/Recovery (End of Phillipine-American war)
1910s – Promise (Relativity, X-rays, radio, Hollywood, World War I)
1920s – Turmoil (Flappers, Roaring 20s)
1930s – Depression (Great Depression)
1940s – War/Recovery (WWII)
1950s – Promise (TV)
1960s – Turmoil (Vietname, hippies)
1970s – Depression (Stagflation)
1980s – War/Recovery (Cold war)
1990s – Promise (Peace, tech boom, Internet)
2000s – Turmoil (World Trade Center, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism)
2010s – Depression
2020s – War/Recovery

Read Pattern of the Decades

Update: The more I look at the market the more I think this may be true. The past few weeks have seen hard days in the stock market, many of them closed at grater than 600 point losses. As it stands, the markets are now no better than they were more than five years ago, and this after the all time high about a year ago. Things don’t look good, time to “batten down the hatches”!