You cannot fight the cycle
NOBODY really likes another person saying to him or her, “I told you so” (ITYS). however, listening is valuable because the ITYS is part of a timeline. If you had listened to that person earlier, you might not have suffered or be surprised by the consequences today.
No husband ever wants to hear his wife say “I told you to get gas before we left” while they are stranded by the side of the road.
On August 3, 2012 Natalie Wolchover wrote an article titled “Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?” for Live Science, an online magazine that is part of the Future plc group, a British media company founded in 1985.
The article’s basic premise is that there have been major violent upheavals in the United States every 50 years. “The Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement triggered a third peak in violent political, social, and racial conflict. Fifty years after that will be 2020.” Wolchover quotes Peter Turchin, a Russian-american
scientist specializing in cultural evolution. Turchin coined the term “cliodynamics,” which he describes as an “attempt to find meaningful patterns in history.”
Some of us do cliodynamics every day trading the financial and asset markets. It is all about patterns, which lead us to cycles.
Allow me then my ITYS moment. In the Businessmirror October 9, 2018, PHL and the economic chaos: “Political chaos is always followed by ‘economic chaos’ and that is what we are entering.” “Economic chaos: 2020”—July 25, 2019: “The cycle will change again in January 2020 to a period of economic chaos.” On July 30, 2019 I wrote: “The turning of the economic cycle in 2020
All the theories about the how and why of Covid-19 and all the never-ending analysis of what global governments should or should not have done are great intellectual exercises when you are locked down at home. The cycles said 2020 would be a time of economic chaos. The reasons are not important.
is inevitable. A continuation of the trending global economic slowdown will see a fall in oil prices because of decreased demand.” Then on September 26, 2019: “The period of Political Chaos began in October 2015. The period of Economic Chaos will begin in January 2020.”
These were not predictions like the one I wrote on January 3, 2019 about the local stock market. “Don’t worry—be happy. 2019 is going to be a good year. 2018 was a correction. Now we write a new uptrend.”
Predictions—like mine—are meaningless, even worthless, because they forecast an event or events happening without any context. If I go out every morning and say that it is going to rain, eventually that “prediction” will come true. The “Bubble Boys” have been calling for a “collapse” in the global economy every day for the past 10 years. Finally, they have their rain.
But the economic cycle said 2020 without equivocation. But it is only because of the Covid-19 crises you might think. Strangely enough—or maybe not strange at all—events fit the cycle rather than the cycle following the events.
During the 1918 global flu pandemic, 28 percent of the US population—105 million—was infected, with 675,000 deaths. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a report in 2007. “Most of the evidence indicates that the economic effects of the 1918 inf luenza pandemic were short term.” The economic cycle was on an upswing since 1916 that carried through until the major economic cycle ended in 1929.
All the theories about the how and why of Covid-19 and all the neverending analysis of what global governments should or should not have done are great intellectual exercises when you are locked down at home. The cycles said 2020 would be a time of economic chaos. The reasons are not important.