Isn't it amazing how history repeats itself? My adopted dad from 3 months of age, Douglas Anderson, lived through the Great Depression. Then he became a small town capitalist. He needed loans to roll over inventory. I learned about procyclical bank behavior at a young age. He had to plead with a banker once, in the early '60s if memory recalls, to roll over inventory, convincing him that the bump in the economy would be short-lived.

I am sure a lot of that pleading took place on a much grander scale during the Great Recession. There are lots of examples of banks not foreclosing on wealthy homeowners, and of loans being extended for large corporations. Don't be a small guy like my dad and expect to avoid the procyclical hammer in modern America. I miss him. He probably shortened his life by the excessive workload that small business required. No computer systems to help out in those days.

I found out about my natural father through DNA testing done in 2017. Turns out he was older (b. 1900) than my adopted dad, and a labor man, a union leader by the name of Armando Ramirez. He is well documented by Cornell University. He was a negotiator and a leader of men, and most of his career was spent in leadership of tobacco rollers. He ended his career in the 1199 nurses union of NYC, where he fought for better wages for nurses. They were mostly minorities and he took them on strikes to get them a better life. He retired as Vice President of the union.

Armando was also into radical politics. He was, for a time, a member of the communist party. In the 30's, in the throes of the Great Depression, people looked around for alternatives to capitalism. It was not uncommon for men to join the communist party, or seek a fascist populism. I was always taught that communism was left wing and fascism was right wing. And remember, in the 1930's, neither communism nor fascism had yet failed! 

Turns out that Armando was keen enough to resign the communist party when the Taft-Hartley bill required it as a means to continue in union leadership. It was also called the slave labor bill, and that is a fairly accurate assessment. Unions were weakened after that.

Armando went on to put that turmoil behind him. I would have liked to have met him. While my mother was English, and with fairly narrow north European DNA, Armando was Heinz 57, with all manner of Mediterranean nationalities, according to my testing. I have cousins (3rd to distant) who are Basque, Portuguese, French, Jewish, Italian, Sub Saharan, Spanish and North African. My genes get along fine.

Trump

So, we come to today, and we have a right wing populist president, Donald Trump, who appears to dabble in racism and even fascism in his adoration of strong man leaders. And we have students on college campuses moving to the far left, embracing radical socialism. When times are good, those isms are largely forgotten. But the decade of the Great Depression brought the isms and we are back to many engaged in isms once again after the Great Recession.

John Feehery (I am not a big fan of his) wrote a fascinating article about the isms. He was a bit optimistic after the crash of 2008, because he said isms (the bad isms which failed) are largely a thing of the past. He did give a favorable accolade to Libertarianism, which, unfortunately, failed in the housing bubble and crash. Capitalism is an ism too, and has brought about relative prosperity not known in the history of the world. It is the only one that has not failed, but that is not saying it couldn't. We hope it doesn't, but wise leaders are needed to prevent that.

Feehery believes that we all have to live on this earth together. While he may want the USA to be in charge, which puts our nation at risk, IMO, he does recognize that it is dangerous to completely go our own ways. He wrote that the people should decide the future of the world. We wish.

Italy

Italy has introduced a new ism. Since Fusionism is already taken, we could call it Leftrightism. It has embraced a fusion of right and left radicalism. Right and left isms are now a part of Italian leadership! Russia and Germany were not able to merge their isms at the beginning of WWII, to the benefit of us all. A worldwide fusion of right and left can't be good. But when you give up your own currency, anything can happen.

However, as with most far right and far left parties, promises are large, and largely unable to be fulfilled. But it is interesting that left and right both have concluded that the Eurozone is a big problem. It is a very big problem.

As Andrew Pease of Russel Investments points out:

A coalition pairing of the right-wing populist Lega Nord (League) party and the left-wing populist 5-Star Movement (M5S) party was never a recipe for stability, in our view.  Why? Both had promised a fight with European Union leaders in Brussels over fiscal rules and both campaigned on unaffordable promises. Markets were initially calmed by the appointment in June of the fiscally conservative economics professor, Giovanni Tria, as finance minister. This created the impression that the new government would not be too fiscally irresponsible—an idea which has since largely gone by the wayside.

The only problem is, as with Greece, the cure may end up being worse than the disease. Let the banks cure your ills and you will be slaves to banking. Greece became a tragedy. It will be interesting how Italy will make out in this environment where Germany holds all the Eurozone cards. 

China 

China is not as weak as people think. It is a command economy (commandism?), with many state owned corporations and is a socialist nation. It is not classic communism, as it does not require the overthrow of capitalism. While leaning to socialism far more than the US, it is, like the US, a form of Mixturism.

It is a one-party system with no freedom of speech. Those both are odious ideas, yet it appears there is more income equality in China. That is a stabilizing factor. It appears there is more income inequality in the USA:

...there’s one major difference, which suggests the problem may be more dire on American soil. That regards how the bottom 50 percent of income earners are taking part in -- or in the case of the U.S., losing out on -- the country’s economic growth.
America has experienced “a complete collapse of the bottom 50 percent income share in the U.S. between 1978 to 2015,” the authors wrote. “In contrast, and in spite of a similar qualitative trend, the bottom 50 percent share remains higher than the top 1 percent share in 2015 in China.”

China wants to nip the tendency of capitalism to destroy the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. The capitalists in the USA generally do not care much for the bottom 50 percent although there are exceptions. The Chinese are in the process of experimentation with the capitalism socialism mix, and the result is simply unknown. The US appears to be in the process of weakening its minimal mixturism, as Paul Ryan does want to scale back Social Security and Medicare.

But if the US government would simply attempt to pull up the lower rungs, the world would have more confidence in our way of life. As it is, China is fusing with Russia, Pakistan, and India to form the largest cooperative block of people in the world. The power in Asia is the people, and their ability to produce and to buy. 

In the USA, with the demise of union power, the economic power has gravitated almost completely to the capitalists, who appear to be investing less, and are just profit takers. They stole from the middle class in the housing bubble and crash, regardless of Rick Santelli's mindless concept that the middle class just bet on housing and lost. This is an example of the disrespect that many capitalists in America have for people who buy their stuff. And they wonder why many millennials have little respect for them now.

Add to this, the capitalists' multinational reliance on Asia is put in jeopardy by POTUS.  Under these new trying conditions, hurt feelings, housing debacles, and tariff threats, which proved disastrous in the Great Depression, which nation will prevail? Certainly China has the people, the purchasing power, the buyers, the surpluses, but the US has the reserve currency. 

Seems like serious damage could occur on both sides, if moderation does not prevail. Retail investors may want to take profits rather than risk losing new capital. Smart money is behaving this way, as a warning to all. A list of stocks with the most risk to China should be treated with caution by retail investors. Those include Boeing, Apple, and Starbucks.