Some specific statements in recent posts:
Quote:
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Sept. 29, 2008: "Stocks skidded Monday, with the Dow slumping nearly 778 points, in the biggest single-day point loss ever . . .
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A 7% drop, compared with the 37% drop from October 29, 1929 - mid 1932. And to look at the point drop is really to exaggerate the effect.
But more interesting, it seems that the recession referred to as being in 2007 and 2008 was really in 2008 - 2009. And even though the stock market began to recover from its low in 2009, the economy struggled for a while longer.
Let's look at these items from Cahn's book:
Quote:
The Crash of 1901-1903, brought on by the struggles of E. H. Harriman, Jacob Schiff and J. P. Morgan to gain financial control of Northern Pacific Railroad often referred to as the 1901-1903 depression.
The Crash of 1916-1917, World War I
The Crash of 1930-1932, the Great Depression
The Crash of 1937-1938, The recession of the Great Depression
The Crash of 1973, the crash of multiple crises
The Crash of 2000-2001, the dot.com crash.
The Crash of 2007-2008, the Great Recession
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The last one is more notably bad. The crash was from early-mid 2008 through mid 2009. The dot.com debacle began in 2000, but as of early 2002, while it did have a big drop in 01 from which it had recovered, did not really go "south" until mid 2002 had not recovered until about the beginning of 2004.
A look at the history of the stock market shows that there have been approximately 28 years that had notable drops. A few of these are part of ongoing drops, like the 4 years from 1929 through 1932. If you catalogue them in terms of events/downturns/crashes, there are about 22, of which 9 are major.
The 16-17 and 37-38 recessions did not really show up on the stock market.
Stack these in seven-year batches and a pattern emerges. And the pattern is the lack of a pattern, or more accurately, the pattern of cherry-picking events out of a rather random population by someone with an agenda. (Seems like studies of acupuncture.)
The events are neither skewed to any particular seven-year cycle, nor are they uniformly scattered over the population. One sequence of 7 years had only 1 event included. 2 had 2. 1 had 3. 1 had 6 and 2 had 7.
There were periods of 17 years, 10 years, and 8 years in which there was no notable downturn.
The only conclusion from this is that if you just look at the stock market, you can probably cherry-pick events that linked on or close to any number of days or cycles of years, if you are willing to just see it happen once or twice here and there. Add in the somewhat different cycle of recessions and depressions which do not necessarily coincide with the stock market downturns (often seem disconnected) and you have a rather large scatter of data to establish anything you want if you hide the bulk of the data that is not consistent with your theory.
Patterns are not found by selecting items that fit a premise from a population that does not. They are found by seeing something in the data as a whole that suggests something more than random chance. There is no statistical analysis that will give you a Shemitah. Rather, it will deny any such clear pattern. Not even a hidden pattern.