An online source I have come to heed goes by the name SLAWEKP, put up by Paul Slawek who migrated to this country from Poland and now lives in Seattle where he runs a car and truck rental business. Slawek has demonstrated a remarkable ability to dig up seemingly unrelated clusters of facts and combine them into new informational wholes.

On March 17 this year he alerted his readers with the headline: "The 72-Year Cycle Crash Due Now." The 72-year cycle is of Mayan astrological origin and last clocked on July 8, 1932 when stock prices hit their bottom during the great depression of the 1930s. Going back from that point 72 years marked the 1858 pit of the Crash of 1857. Going forward brings us to July 8, 2004—plus or minus 118 days, Slawek calculates.

What is the New Economy?

If you get your news from TV, you've noticed that newscasters are split on the question of whether the economy is improving or not. Financial channels focus on the stock market. CNN's Lou Dobbs focuses on the outsourcing of American jobs and the growing number of illegal immigrants driving down American wages. Economists paid by government or corporations assure us that dramatic increases in productivity is a sure sign of a robust recovery for "the new economy". What is the new economy? And does it have anything to do with Slawek's 72-year cycle of Mayan derivation?

What best defines the new economy is a form of investing called derivatives. "...the US financial derivatives market has a volume of $300 trillion dollars. Derivatives are any financial instrument or commodity derived from a real source of wealth such as stocks, land or gold. For example, a gold future is a derivative. Stock options and margins are derivatives. Derivatives have no connection to real productivity or value." (1) If $300 trillion dollars were invested, instead, in the production of goods and services, infrastructure and social programs, it would improve the overall economy. But that would not return the "productivity" (profits) that chancing the $300 trillion in derivatives produces.

Although this kind of investment has a new name, it's not a new game. “Speculation," as it used to be called, was rife in the 1920s before the Crash of 1929. It was also rife in the 1720s leading to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble and, in Paris, the sudden unraveling of the Mississippi Swindle, speculation in land along the banks of the Mississippi River promoted by one John Law, a Scotsman who became the Alan Greenspan of France , briefly. History also records another event called Tulip Mania. The list goes on. Get-rich-quick schemes are as old as our illustrious species, but two things are different this time around: 1) derivatives are for the super rich only, and 2) money is no longer on the gold standard, it "floats free."

You can't join a respectable hedge fund (derivatives club) unless you're a multi-millionaire. The Federal Reserve can print as much money as it believes, in its secluded wisdom, is needed because no one can exchange a dollar for a dollar's worth of gold. Gold is now a commodity, bet up or down by hedge funds, using practically unlimited amounts of e-money, numbers in bank computers.

Derivatives derive from medieval agricultural futures contracts, when speculators bought farmers' produce months ahead of delivery. That kind of gamble was socially beneficial because it kept produce prices from wild fluctuations. Today's derivatives are gambles on price fluctuations. Since the super rich use their bank's money, one bad play could rack up a lot of computer numbers, which are counted as real money, measures of value. And since even the canniest gambler is sure to lose once in a while, the only questions are when and how much.

I decided to do a Western astrological study to see if a planetary signature could be found for the Mayan-derived 72-year cycle. There are a dozen or more ways one could go about this. I chose what I consider the simplest and, usually, the most telling: comparing 72-year cycle lows to a natal chart of the USA.

Transits to the U.S. Chart

I found that in 1932, the US Mercury-Pluto opposition was being hit by Pluto conjunct the US Mercury opposite Saturn conjunct the US Pluto. In 1858, 72 years previous, the US Mercury-Pluto opposition was hit by Saturn conjunct the US Mercury, opposite Pluto conjunct the US Pluto. This could lead us to suppose it may be Saturn-Pluto oppositions, afflicting the US Mercury-Pluto opposition, which we should look for in July 2004 when the 72-year cycle is due. But in July 2004 Pluto is opposite the US Mars, and Saturn (with the Sun) conjunct the US Sun. Chiron will be conjunct the US Pluto opposite the US Mercury. Thus in July neither Saturn nor Pluto will negatively hit the US Mercury-Pluto opposition, although both will be hitting economically sensitive points in the US natal chart.

But planetary cycles do not dance to the beat of our earthly calendar and it looks more likely that the 72-year cycle will be ripe to click in September when Saturn will come conjunct the US Mercury and thus opposite the US Pluto, while the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto will form a dangerous T-square with the US Mars-Neptune square, an historic indication of financial trouble.

Slawek points out that Mayan astrology was "rooted in the Earth's rotation," and thus there may be no exact Western astrological equivalence for it. The Maya put more emphasis on points in the universe surrounding our solar system. In an email sent March 17, Slawek said:

If the 72-year cycle remains true to past form, it will mean something more severe than what the term "secular bear market" means. The financial markets are not the whole economy, however, so it's possible for the financial system to flourish or flounder without benefiting or damaging the whole economy. It depends on how we collectively respond. How we are likely to collectively respond depends on who gets elected in November 2004. If Bush is reelected, more money will likely be transferred to the investor class (big tax cuts for the rich) in the hope that more investment will pull the overall economy up.

Democratic candidate John Kerry has said he will arrest the outsourcing of American jobs by removing taxpayer-funded subsidies for big corporations to move abroad, and incentivize companies that stay home. It hardly makes sense for American workers to subsidize the loss of their own jobs. More jobs mean the production of more real goods and services, stimulating investment in real things rather than in price fluctuations. So far, neither Bush nor Kerry has addressed the derivatives game, the production of free-floating dollar profits without the need to hire workers.

Meanwhile, the optimism of TV pundits remains as immutable as gold. Who should we believe?—the "best economic minds of our time" or the remains of long-gone Mayan astrologers, who predicted that if money loses its moorings in physical reality—(the world's currencies now "float free")—a major financial breakdown would be inevitable.(3)

Endnotes:

1 & 2. Both these quotes are from the website, "From the Wilderness" article about an economic conference held in Moscow. The first quoted is Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, Scientific Advisor to the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), Wiesbaden, Germany, at an economic conference held in Moscow in March of 2001.

3. See Mayan Time & Money by Robert Gover.

Robert Gover's book Time and Money: the Economy and the Planets came out in late May, 2005. Euromoney Magazine reviewed it in late 2005. Robert has partnered with a fund manager in Florida, Mike Mansfield, to do a financial newsletter. Robert was the featured speaker at a conference of investors from around the world in Denver on September 24, 2005, He has a BA in economics and has studied astrology since 1965. By the mid-1970s, he had become interested in stock market astrology, and by the mid-1980s, with the advent of astrological software, his interest had expanded to the whole economy. Time and Money may be purchased from www.hopepubs.com, or amazon, B&N and other online vendors, as well as book stores. Robert is a memmber of the International Society of Astrological Research, the International Society of Business Astrologers, and the American Federation of Astrologers. He is also a novelist, and the latest edition of his most famous book One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding can be purchased at most online bookstores. His other novels may be obtained from used or rare book dealers. He has written one other nonfiction book: Voodoo Contra, about the conradictory meanings of that ominous word.