Socionomics In One Lesson

Could the 11,000-Point Dow Make Us All Miserable?

If a group of predictive theorists are to be believed, the market's about to nosedive — and Americans will get very, very angry... about everything. So is it B.S., or might a national malaise take down Obama?

By John H. Richardson (Esquire, April 14, 2010, link below)

For decades, stock investors have known that hemlines track stocks — that short skirts mean good times. That's always been my philosophy, for sure. But there's definitely a dark side to ponder: Did you know that bear markets tend to trigger wars? That the size of a war almost always correlates with the size of the bear market that preceded it? That the use of words like "we" and "they" appear to increase as economic trouble approaches? That the popularity of horror movies increase as economic trouble approaches? (Seriously: Check out this report and see how Night of the Living Dead, released at a market peak in 1968, was followed by steady erosion in stocks accompanied by the mood music, as it were, of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and finally, in 1980, at the grim bottom of the '70s recession, by Friday the 13th).

These statistics come courtesy of the Elliott Wave theorists, a cult of chart obsessives who try to predict the stock market by following trends in social mood — most recently, in an article in The Socionomist (the Elliott Wave newsletter) that follows the current growth of secessionist sentiment — the militias, the tenthers, the birthers, the federal-reserve haters, the fad for nullification of federal laws. A recent Rasmussen poll found the gap between the government and the people as big as the one that preceded the Revolution — just 21 percent of voters now believe that our government rests on the consent of governed, which is a founding principle of our country. To help track all this, the Socionomist article includes the first-ever index of secessionism as it corresponds to dips in the stock market — which is, it turns out, pretty damn close.

The bad news is that the theorists think civil war is a "distinct possibility."

Complete article here

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