Time's Fool

" If the duration of the current rally were to take the same portion of its ruling cycle that the 1929-1930 rally did, when would it end? The 1929-1930 rally lasted 155 days out of 968 in the cycle (1932 was a leap year), for a ratio of 0.1601. The 16.6-16.9-year span ends between February 19 and June 9, 2016. Applying the 0.1601 ratio to this period of 2541-2652 days from the March 6, 2009 low would give rally durations of 406.81-424.59 days, suggesting a peak in the current rally between April 16 and May 5. Using intraday turning dates projects exactly the same range. As Beautiful Pictures shows, time targeting usually works out to within 3 days. With April 14 already behind us and May 8 a Saturday, we can project a top on this basis between April 15 and may 7, 2010. April 16, by the way, marks the anniversary of the 1930 rally peak. These dates pertain only if the current rally matches its predecessor in percent-of-cycle terms, which is conjecture, but given all the other evid

Credit cards have been only one piece of the historically massive shift in the organization of our economy, and thus of our society, from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism . Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971 was another indicator of that shift. (Conservatives today rant about the shift from "real" money to "fiat" money, instead of focussing on the perversion of capitalism that widespread credit and over-expanded financial markets constitute. Socialists rant about the loss of connection between money and its real basis, labor, but only sometimes concern themselves with the social compact at the root of all social order and its necessary concommitants, interpersonal trust and the interpersonal infrastructure that is social capital. These are matters of economic philosophy that are really worth getting your heads around because they are at the root of the crisis of Western civilization. But as with all crisis-cores, they are heavily masked by