INTRODUCTION – WHY ARE YOU SO CAUGHT (AS IN A TRAP) IN TODAY’S FINANCIAL WORLD?
I have been considering writing a book ever since my granddaughter suggested it. At that time I was busy, in my retirement, writing a newsletter devoted to global financial and cultural matters. My granddaughter can be very persuasive however!
In my many years in the financial markets, culminating as a Senior Foreign Exchange Advisor with Bank of America in Seattle, Washington (I am a Canadian citizen) I came to the conclusion that what we are seeing and hearing about our globalised economy could be assessed via a thorough study of economics and what makes it work. This is a study of how a particular culture influences what we see and consider about such trends. My granddaughter, and then my family, suggested that I could reach many more people than I could with a simple newsletter.
I agreed with this and so was born “What ... IS... Happening?”. In my book I wish to try and tell people, based on my forty years plus of financial experience, why they are feeling so “caught” by what they read everyday in their favourite medium, whatever that may be. It seems that whatever our leaders, politicians and financial specialists tell us, nothing ever seems to get better.
We suffer from squeezed incomes and whatever we try to do to enjoy what our societies offer us, we can never fully savour the fruits of our labours. Debt mounts up as we borrow to bridge the differences between our wants and our incomes and throughout all of this we constantly read about the CEO of a major corporation enjoying yet another multi-million dollar bonus. This lucky person enjoys such riches for apparently doing little more than firing thousands of local workers and sending the jobs to China, Cambodia, Bangladesh or someplace that many of us have never heard of.
New records are set with the number of freshly minted billionaires increasing every year, while we slog along wondering how the dentist bills are going to be paid.
Resting up after a crippling leg injury suffered last September, I chanced to reacquaint myself with the analysis of a noted financial author who has been in the business for decades: Marty Armstrong. The man is a genius in my view and he has discovered that markets operate according to various cycles.
No, nothing new there, but he showed again and again that a multiple of Pi (ie the 3.1416 number we learned about in high school to discover the area of a circle given its radius) dominates many of the financial markets we see. His hypothesis was a simple one. We should forget the hyperbole surrounding what the financial press says about financial panics, as the various reporting media tend to be swept up in the emotions of the moment. All of what we see can be defined on longer term considerations, he says, and that is what we should be looking at.
Fascinated, and being bedridden with little to occupy my time, I started to wonder if our culture itself could be subject to the same Pi Cycle. Remarkably, I think that it CAN! I started with a very old template (The Bible) for the principles which America was supposed be founded on: a Christian nation which is subject to cycles, and this we have apparently been warned about for thousands of years.
No, please do not roll your eyeballs at this mention of The Bible (which another of my daughters did when I told her about this project). Hear me out. You have not wasted your money in buying this book – really and truly!
Without some sort of mathematical proof of what I am writing about, I might agree with you and indulge in eyeball rolling myself! But there IS proof and thanks to the idea I obtained from Mr. Armstrong I decided to go ahead with all that I am about to show you. I would like to give you one small example of what lies ahead in Chapter One.
I simply cannot believe that all of what follows is a mathematical coincidence to be frank. Look up the Old Testament; in particular the Book of Daniel 8:14 where the two angels are talking about 2300 “mornings and evenings”. I started to play with Pi on my hand held calculator and found the following – with Pi valued here at 3.14159 (my calculator won’t go any higher than five decimal places!).
2300/3.14159/3.14159 = 233.039. Now 233 is a Fibonacci Number (part of a sequence formed by adding the two previous whole numbers in a sequence together, starting at 1 – ie 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,89,144,233 etc.) and I also found out that 233 ties in beautifully with the story of the United States and its founding in 1776. Want to see more? Go to Segment One – The Bible and Pi, and what it says about the next few years.
Fibonacci analyses, by the way, are very useful for equity (stock market) traders in assessing various heights and depths of markets, and after a rise (or fall) just how far a rebound can come. In other words, they are not an idle curiosity factor but something with real usefulness for a major trader.
They also have a very good practical benefit in assessing the future of the USA (and the Western world, as it is all tied together via the large scale use of the US$, the world’s Reserve Currency). Anyhow, have a look at what I have found as it does tie in with the thesis of this book in my opinion.
Let us continue with the 2300 analysis. We take 2300/233.039 and arrive at 9.86596. Divide this by 3.14159 and we get (drum roll) ... 3.14159; in other words Pi almost exactly! So, this caught my attention, and with plenty of time to analyse other possible Biblical Pi cycles I certainly had the opportunity to do such an exercise! There is a GREAT deal more interestingly enough, and I shall be putting this in Chapter One for your perusal.
There are many other ideas which I wish to share with you and we can do this in the remaining chapters of this book. There are sections on “Oil and Politics” which would also include a good look at the giant Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada (my home province) and how it can affect what you pay for your weekly (more frequent?) fill-up at the pump.
It also says a lot about how the Western World operates, given that so much revolves around the price of this critical commodity. What about US politics and what can we say about the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton?
Ah, there is so much to help you understand “What ... IS ... Happening”?
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