>>/ The official NBER-certified bottom of the 1929-33 contraction was /
>>/ March 1933, when FDR was inaugurated. Wonder if the cyclical magic /
>>/ will transfer to Obama? /
>/ /
>/ Seriously? /
>Doug: Half. Or 40%. Yeah.
Nick Paumgarten writes in the New Yorker, Talk of the Town:
Another guest, a trader and market strategist who had voted for Ralph Nader, agreed about 2012, but according to a different logic. He expounded on a belief he held regarding the cycles of history and the markets. It was based, he said, on the formula for the circumference of a circle—the idea that 2π/r/ might apply to the financial cycle—and, in combination with various Fibonacci fractal techniques, it had made him a lot of money. You could slice up history into what he called pi cycles, each lasting exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days, or 8.6 years. You could subdivide these, by the hours on a clock, say, or the signs of the zodiac, and detect mini-cycles of 8.6 months. He rattled off a series of inflectionary dates and occurrences: the Nikkei high, in late 1989; the ruble collapse, in mid-1998; the historically tight credit spreads in early 2007. By God, he was onto something. Another Tusker, please. In the background, the electoral map showed that at some point during this dissertation Obama had taken Pennsylvania and Ohio.
According to pi-cycle theory, after a failed attempt at a rally between now and next spring, the market will not hit bottom until June, 2011, so Obama may be doomed to muddle through a deepening recession and the unpopularity that comes with it, and whoever succeeds him in 2012, should he lose, will then have the chance to ride the recovery—to be, in the public’s untrained eye, the transformative F.D.R. or Ronald Reagan that people dearly want Obama to be now. Unless, of course, one adheres to the Venn-diagram view of history, in which case November 4, 2008, could feasibly be Day One in another pi cycle. Where they overlap is anyone’s guess.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/11/17/081117ta_talk_paumgarten __
Jenny Brown