Future Ups and Downs into 2065 | Samuel Benner’s Prophecies

Samuel Benner was a farmer from Ohio who first published his prophecies about price fluctuations in 1875. The 19th century was the time of Laplacian probability, Gaussian distributions, Peano curves and Cantor set. While mathematicians were looking for structures in mathematics, Samuel Benner was studying and writing about a model of ‘Time’ to forecast the future. He lived in an era of Axe Houghton Indices, the time when the Chicago Board of Trade was established and agricultural commodity trading was active business. Society was busy with agriculture and expanding railroads. This is why his workings were based on pig iron, corn, cotton and hogs. Along with agriculture came the essential science of weather forecasting. What years would be dry or wet? When to expect years of heat, storm and cold? Agricultural statistics was compiled and used to establish demand and supply patterns. 

 

It was then 140 years back Benner wrote that the future cannot be calculated based on agricultural statistics. Statistics compilation would remain always poor, irregular, manipulable, undependable and non predictive. For Benner the axiom “history repeats itself” implies a cyclical movement in human affairs, and as it is a generally received opinion that everything moves in cycles, especially in nature. 

 

Prediction of the future can only be done by studying the past. History repeats itself with marvelous accuracy in detail from one panic year to another. Samuel Benner was the first to show how history repeated systematically. He was vocal about the cyclicality of financial catastrophes and his model illustrated the crisis' of 1891, 1902, 1910 and even 1929, 1987 and 2003. However, 2009 was a big miss in his set of nested cycles (exactly 20 Lunar Node Cycles after the 1637 Dutch Tulipomania bust). Time according to Benner was a pattern, a rule that did not change because of war, panic or elections. It was relentless in nature. It was periodical and not haphazard. The rule was unchangeable, determinable. Failures in business were connected with ignorance of ‘Time’. 

 

Today one can judge Samuel Benner as a farmer or a genius, but that would not change the fact that he was one of the first to see the mathematical hierarchy in ‘Time’. The story of the Benner’s work is intertwined with his personal experiences of bankruptcy. He was a prosperous farmer who was wiped out financially by the 1873 panic and then wanted to find out about the law of nature. He took the yearly average prices to smoothen the data. When he compared them he saw up and down yearly cycles repeating in a fixed sequence of a large cycle of 18-20-16 years and a small cycle of 9-10-8 years. The cycles low depicted reactions and depressions. According to Benner these were cast iron rules and he referred to them as ‘God in prices’.  

Benner discovered an 11 year cycle in corn and hog prices with alternating peaks at 4 and 6 year intervals. He also discovered an 11 year cycle peak in cotton prices and a 27 year cycle in pig iron prices with lows every 11, 9 and 7 years and peaks in a sequential order of 8, 9 and 10 years. He described a 54 Year Panic Cycle which arose from panics every 16, 18, 20 years, with this series repeating every 54 years, or as he explains, “it takes panics 54 years in their order to make a revolution or to return to the same order”. 

 His book is one of the first examples of the development of cycles and periodicity theory in financial and commodity markets and was very popular amongst bankers and business men of the late 1800’s. His cycles and numerical sequences were effective throughout the 20th century, and can still be found to be operative today, predicting financial prices. Theorists will notice the similarities between his 11 year cycle and the sunspot cycle also of 11 years, something which has even been studied in current times by the Federal Reserve. Whether Benner was knowledgeable about this direct influence or not, he did make a connection through the weather and climate, and was likely aware of the earlier work on sunspots by Herschel, Jevons and others.

Benner never fully explained the basis of his cycle theories, but did state: "The cause producing the periodicity and length of these cycles may be found in our solar system … It may be a meteorological fact that Jupiter is the ruling element in our price cycles of natural productions; while also it may be suggested that Saturn exerts an influence regulating the cycles in manufacture and trade." Further, Uranus and Neptune: "may send forth an electric influence affecting Jupiter, Saturn and, in turn, the Earth … When certain combinations are ascertained which produce one legitimate invariable manifestation from an analysis of the operations of the combined solar system, we may be enabled to discover the cause producing our price cycles, and the length of their duration."

Later the larger 54 year cycle was also discussed in detail by Russian economist Kondratiev in 1925. Edward R. Dewey, Director of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, assessed Benner's pig iron price forecasts over a 60 year period. Remarkably, he regarded this cycle as showing a gain - loss ratio of 45 to 1, which was “the most notable forecast of prices in existence”.

Extending and updating Samuel Benner's cycles and correlating them with more recent US-stock market prices, pointed to the low in 2003, the high in 2010, and the minor crisis in 2011. This would then be followed by a rising stock market into 2018 and a depression in 2021. 

2013 - Peaks in Solar Cycle #24, Stocks and Commodities

Credits: John Hampson

... Solar peaks occur roughly every 11 years and secular peaks in equities and commodities occur close to solar peaks. There is a sine wave in long term real stocks and an opposite-polarity sine wave in long term real commodities, both which have around a 33 year (equivalent to 3 solar cycles or 1 lunisolar cycle) duration ... Treasuries (or inverse rates/yields) move in around a 66 year cycle (2 lunisolar cycles) with peaks and troughs converging with secular commodities peaks. The result is we see two different kinds of secular commodities bulls: one set against rates moving to a peak, and one set against rates moving to nothing ...

The K-Wave: Heretical Thoughts & Practical Understandings | Tony Plummer

 Credits: MARKET TECHNICIAN - Issue 59 – July 2007.

The Sixth Kondratiev Long Wave Cycle

 

The Sun, the Moon, and the Number 56 | David McMinn

A 56-year cycle has been established in trends of US and western European financial crises since 1760 (Funk 1932; McMinn 1996). Clearly, many major financial crises are precipitated by some mechanism, as they tend to occur preferentially in patterns of the 56-year cycle and not as random events. Numerous cosmic factors were examined for some link with the timing of financial crises.

 

Traditional astrology and sunspots were the initial areas favoured for assessment, but no significance could be realized. This is hardly surprising, as rigorous research has offered little support for astrological theory (Dean and Mather 1978; Culver and Ianna 1984). However, the 56-year cycle was found to correlate very closely with cycles of the sun and moon.

The author believes changing mob psychology forms the basis of cycles of financial crises. This repetitive cycle of speculative frenzy, panic, and pessimism has persisted throughout modern economic history; people learn very little from the greed and foolishness of the preceding generation. People are hypothesized to undergo alterations in mass mood in accordance with changing sun-moon cycles. Financial crises occur when there is a sudden shift in sentiment from optimism to fear.

This paper follows directly on from the work of McMinn (1996). The underscored years are listed as major crises by Kindleberger (1989).

Solunar Cycles: The nodal cycle (or nutation cycle) equals 18.6 years. The north and south nodes are two hypothetical points, 180° apart on the ecliptic circle, where the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun (the ecliptic) is intersected by the plane of the moon’s orbit around the earth. (The moon’s orbit is inclined at 5° to the ecliptic.) The ascending (north) node is the point where the moon crosses from below to above the ecliptic. The descending (south) node is where the moon crosses from above to below the ecliptic. The moon’s north node takes 18.6 years (one nodal cycle) to complete one cycle retrograde (clockwise) through the ecliptic circle.

The solar year equals 365.24 days. This is the time the sun takes to complete one cycle of the ecliptic circle. This time unit forms the basis of the 56-year sequences, the 36-year subcycles (9, 18, 36, 54 years), and the various artifact subcycles (10/20 years, 13/26/52 years, etc.).

The eclipse year equals 346.62 days. This is the time the sun takes to complete one cycle, north node to north node. For an eclipse to take place, the sun-moon-earth must align in a straight line, which can only happen when the sun and moon are near the north and/or south node. A solar eclipse (partial or total) can occur only when a new moon (i.e., the sun is 0° to the moon) is within about 19° of the nodes. Similarly, a lunar eclipse may only be evident when a full moon (i.e., the sun and moon are 180° apart) is within about 12° of these points.

The saros cycle equals 18.03 years. It has been widely appreciated for millennia and was known to the ancient Babylonian astronomer-priests. Every 223 lunar months (one saros cycle), the sun, moon, and the moon’s nodes align in the same relative angles to each other within a fraction of a degree. One saros cycle of 18 solar years is equal to 19 eclipse years.

The half-saros cycle equals 9 years. Every 9 solar years (or 9.5 eclipse years), the moon’s mean relative position is the same angle to the north node, with the sun 180° on the opposite side of the zodiac.

The 56-year cycle. Every 56 years, the sun conjuncts (0° angle) the moon’s north node in almost the same zodiacal position (3° clockwise) and on the same date (minus three or four days). Every 56 solar years (or 59 eclipse years), the sun’s relative position is approximately the same angle to the north node, with the moon 180° on the opposite side of the zodiac.

A similar alignment of solunar cycles occurs every 56 years (692.5 lunar months), as is evident for the half saros (111.5 lunar months) (see Table 1). The 5 in the latter two figures result in alternating solar/lunar eclipses and full/new moons every 111.5 and 692.5 lunar months, respectively.
These cycles—based on the angles 0° and 180° between the sun, moon, and nodes—repeat to within one degree. This is an astonishing astronomical fluke.

 

Solar year: one cycle of the sun from spring equinox to spring equinox; equal to 365.2422 days
Eclipse year: one cycle of the sun from north node to north node; equal to 346.6200 days.
Synodic month: interval between two successive new moons; equals 29.5306 days
Tropical month: one 360° cycle of the zodiac (tropical) by the moon; equal to 27.3216 days.
Nodical month: one cycle of the moon from north node to north node; equal to 27.2122 days.

 

Note: These are average figures. Perturbations exist in the motions of the earth and moon around the sun and deviations from these figures are evident.
 

These 9- and 56-year solunar cycles would not arise if the radii of either the earth-sun or earth-moon orbits varied a little from their current mean distance. The reasons for the importance of 0°/180° angles in these two cycles is unknown, though it may be related to the fact that the north and south nodes are always 180° apart in zodiacal and aspectual circles.

Perturbations. Most importantly, solunar cycles are expressed in terms of mean periods, with considerable fluctuations around the averages. For example, the zodiacal position of the moon may vary by as much as 8° from its mean position.

Sergey Tarassov: DJIA 1789 - 2009 vs Kondratieff Cycle