What Is Happening?

By Gerry Agnew

The book deals with the unbelievable mess we are currently in, economically. I have found a mathematical cycle in the Bible (book of Daniel) that ties in very closely with US history so far as well as what is likely to happen in the next few decades. This is mathematical and is based on the number pi (3.1416) and is explained fully in segment 1, chapter 1. It is also allied with the New Testament book of Revelation. The US is desperate for oil and fresh water and I believe the next US President (Hillary Clinton) wants, and she has said this in a major speech November 2013, a much closer relationship between the three NAFTA countries in North America. This means Mexican labor and Canadian natural resources coming into the United States. A merger between Canada and the United States is probably quite likely in my view, sooner rather than later. Another Segment deals with alternative energy sources of varying descriptions, and the last segment deals with something key for the global economy going forward: the population problem. This is not what you think, and my argument revolves around the fact that we have too few people (i.e., global underpopulation!) to be able to do the critical jobs required as the twenty-first Century unfolds. Finally, I wish to talk about pensions and why the math involved in calculating these spells a very uncertain future for the average American.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491757130

Gerry Agnew

Gerry was born in England but has lived most of his life in Canada close to the US border. He had his first lessons in chart analysis from a professional analyst/trader in 1962 and did his first trade by buying some gold in late 1967. Since then he has been in the banking/trading business culminating in a stay in Seattle in the 1990s, when he was an advisor to major Puget Sound area customers. He retired from banking in the year 2000 and has written two newsletters, one of which is still active. After much egging-on by his family, he wrote What ... IS ... Happening? in 2014. It is his first book.

Book preview

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Copyright © 2015 Gerry Agnew .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-5714-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5713-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922710

iUniverse rev. date: 01/19/2015

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction Why Are You So Ensnared In Today’s Financial World?

SEGMENT 1

Chapter 1 The Genius Of Marty Armstrong And Some Biblical Pi (No, Not Pie!)

Chapter 2 Let’s Have Some Fibonacci Pi!

Chapter 3 Let’s Have Some More Fibonacci Pi! (Appetite Still There?)

SEGMENT 2

Chapter 1 The United States Eyes Canada (Munch, Munch … Chomp, Chomp?)

Chapter 2 Still Munching And Chomping (Who Else Besides Hillary Has This Enormous Appetite?)

Chapter 3

SEGMENT 3 OIL AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY—SLIPPERY SUBSTANCE VERSUS SLIPPERY POLITICIANS!

Chapter 1 Nukes—Are We Really Stuck With This Monster?

Chapter 2 Cold Fusion—Room-Temperature Nukes Without The Risk?

Chapter 3 Solar Power: Something We Can All Understand? Nope!

Chapter 4 Wind Power—Yet Another Bag Of Hot Air? (Guess What I Am Going To Say Here!)

Chapter 5 Hydroelectricity—Yes, This Is A Decent Renewable (They Finally Found One That Works)

Chapter 6 Biomass—Let’s Burn Our Way To Energy Independence

Chapter 7 Okay, Is There Anything You Like That May Actually Work? (Well, Yes, Now That You Mention It!)

Chapter 8 How God Trades Oil! Money, First, Last, And Always – Why Your Pump Prices Have Been So High For So Long

SEGMENT 4

Chapter 1 Is The State Department Correct? Can Iran Start Throwing Nukes Around?

Chapter 2 Enough On Iran, Gerry! Okay, How Do You Feel About North Korea?

Chapter 3 The Population Problem—There Are Not Enough Of Us! Get Breeding, Y’all

Chapter 4 Pensions—What A Mess! No Round-The-World Trips For You In Your Golden Years, Sorry To Say

Epilogue Is All Of What Has Been Written In The Book Enough For You?

Acknowledgments

Behind every author (hopefully a successful one here!) lies his friends and family—people who care and have egged him on with his venture. I have been blessed with three such people, and I wish you to be aware whom you can credit (or curse) for the effort that follows. Why is it that when you need people like this around you, they appear as if by magic?

I wish to thank, with all my heart, my long-suffering wife, who finally got me off my intellectual duff and told me, Write the book, dammit. I have been married to her for nearly forty years now, and she still has to talk like this to get me going. There is no question that without her, this book would not have been written.

My thanks to my granddaughter, Shylee, who continually encouraged me to put the ideas I had been talking to her about into some sort of format that made sense. She got me organized and put the ideas into a meaningful pattern from the chaos they were in before. Wise beyond her twenty years, she told me, You have good information. Get it out to as many people as possible. Thank you, Shylee!

Finally, to a wise woman named Lisa Boag-Guidi, who is a veritable font of ideas, I give my sincere thanks. When I was talking to her about the book and wondering how I should get the relevant ideas together, she merely asked, Why don’t you divide the book into several segments and then expand each one? Such a simple idea and one that I am sure would never have occurred to me if I was left to my own devices. The best ideas are the simplest. Thank you, Lisa!

Introduction

Why Are You So Ensnared in Today’s Financial World?

I have been considering writing a book ever since my granddaughter suggested it. At that time I was busy in my retirement, writing a newsletter devoted to global financial and cultural matters. My granddaughter can be very persuasive, however.

In my many years in the financial markets, culminating as a senior foreign-exchange advisor with Bank of America in Seattle, Washington (I am a Canadian citizen), I came to the conclusion that what we are seeing and hearing about our globalized economy could be assessed via a thorough study of economics and what makes it work. This is a study of how a particular culture influences what we see and consider about such trends. My granddaughter, and then the rest of my family, suggested that I could reach many more people than I could with a simple newsletter.

I agreed with this, and so was born What Is Happening? In my book I wish to tell people, based on my forty-plus years of financial experience, why they are feeling so caught by what they read every day in their favorite medium. It seems that whatever our leaders, politicians, and financial specialists tell us, nothing ever seems to get better.

We suffer from squeezed incomes, and whatever we try to do to enjoy what our societies offer us, we can never fully savor the fruits of our labors. Debt mounts up as we borrow to bridge the differences between our wants and our incomes. And throughout all of this, we constantly read about the CEO of a major corporation enjoying yet another multimillion-dollar bonus. This lucky person enjoys such riches for apparently doing little more than firing thousands of local workers and sending the jobs to China, Cambodia, Bangladesh, or someplace that many of us have never heard of.

New records are set with the number of freshly minted billionaires increasing every year, while we slog along wondering how the dentist bills are going to be paid.

Resting up after a crippling leg injury suffered last September in the aftermath of the High River floods, I chanced to reacquaint myself with the analysis of a noted financial author who has been in the business for decades: Marty Armstrong. The man is a genius in my view, and he has discovered that markets operate according to various cycles.

No, nothing new there, but he showed again and again that a multiple of pi (i.e., the 3.1416 number we learned about in high school to discover the area of a circle given its radius) dominates many of the financial markets we see. His hypothesis was a simple one. We should forget the hyperbole surrounding what the financial press says about financial panics, as the various reporting media tend to be swept up in the emotions of the moment. All of what we see can be defined on longer-term considerations, he says, and that is what we should be looking at.

Fascinated, and bedridden with little to occupy my time, I started to wonder if our culture itself could be subject to the same pi cycle. Remarkably, I think that it can. I started with a very old template (the Bible) for the principles that America was supposed to be founded on: a Christian nation that is subject to cycles. This we have apparently been warned about for thousands of years.

No, please do not roll your eyeballs at this mention of the Bible (which is what another of my daughters did when I told her about this project). Hear me out. You have not wasted your money in buying this book—really and truly!

Without some sort of mathematical proof of what I am writing about, I might agree with you and indulge in eyeball-rolling myself. But there is proof, and thanks to the idea I obtained from Mr. Armstrong, I decided to go ahead with all that I am about to show you. I would like to give you one small example of what lies ahead in CHAPTER 1.

I simply cannot believe that all of what follows is a mathematical coincidence. Look up the Old Testament, in particular Daniel 8:14, where the two angels are talking about 2,300 mornings and evenings. I started to play with pi on my handheld calculator and found the following—with pi valued here at 3.14159 (my calculator won’t go any higher than five decimal places).

2,300/3.14159/3.14159 = 233.039. Now, 233 is a Fibonacci number, which means it is part of a sequence formed by adding the two previous whole numbers together, starting at 1 (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 89, 144, 233, etc.). I also found out that the number 233 ties in beautifully with the story of the United States and its founding in 1776. Want to see more? Go to the Bible and pi section of segment 1, and read what it says about the next few years.

Fibonacci analyses, by the way, are very useful for equity (stock market) traders in assessing various heights and depths of markets and, after a rise (or fall), just how far a rebound can come. In other words, they are not an idle curiosity but something with real usefulness for a major trader.

They also have a very good practical benefit in assessing the future of the United States (and the Western world, as it is all tied together via the large-scale use of the American dollar, the world’s reserve currency). Anyhow, have a look at what I have found, as it does tie in with the thesis of this book.

Let us continue with the 2,300 analysis. We take 2,300/233.039 and arrive at 9.86596. Divide this by 3.14159, and we get (drumroll) … 3.14159, pi almost exactly! This caught my attention, and with plenty of time to analyze other possible biblical pi cycles, I certainly had the opportunity to do so. There is a great deal more, interestingly enough, and I shall be putting this in CHAPTER 1 for your perusal.

There are many other ideas I wish to share with you, and you can read them in the remaining CHAPTERs of this book. There are sections on oil and politics, which also include a good look at the giant tar sands in Alberta, Canada (my home province), and how it can affect what you pay for your weekly (or more frequent) fill-up at the pump.

It also says a lot about how the Western world operates, given that so much revolves around the price of this critical commodity. What about US politics, and what can we say about the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton?

Ah, there is so much to help you understand What Is Happening?

SEGMENT 1

CHAPTER 1

The Genius of Marty Armstrong and Some Biblical Pi (No, Not Pie!)

I have mentioned the redoubtable Marty Armstrong already in the introduction to this book, but it occurs to me that many of you have no idea who the man is. I had better explain, hadn’t I?

He is an analyst par excellence and was responsible (although he probably doesn’t know it in the least) for my finding the extraordinary examples of how pi and Fibonacci analysis are seen in the books of Daniel and Revelation in the Bible. He also has found the economic properties of the number 4.3 (more commonly expressed as twice this, as a cycle based of 8.6 times a unit of time—generally a year).

He found this, apparently, by looking at the time which it takes for the Earth, as measured by the long-term movement of the North Pole, to make a full circle in the sky at night. This takes 25,800 years and is an exact multiple of 8.6—3,000 times. Now, I have no idea why such a huge number of years has an effect on much smaller cycles, such as what he analyzes for his readers, but it does. As such, I would be foolish not to take note of what he says and has proved.

I do not use this number to assess my biblical pi cycles, but it is with great interest I see that what I come up with and what he derives are close to exact in assessing the future. My biblical cycles and his pi and 8.6 (polar cycle, to give it a name) show that we must pay close attention to his discovery and how he has determined it has such an effect in the real world.

I have never seen him refer to the Bible for his work, but of interest is a moment in Daniel 12:11 that says, From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days. The next verse speaks of those people being happy who will persevere until the 1,335th day. This tells us that what Armstrong has found has biblical significance, because 1,290 is exactly divisible by 8.6—150 times.

No, I do not know (yet) what the 150 stands for. But I also note that 1,335 is almost an exact pi multiple. So why did the angel advising Daniel tell him about 1,290 days? Why did he inform him about 1,335 days? Why did the angel use these apparently strange numbers (as opposed to something like 1,300 and 1,350—something nice and round)?

There is clearly something significant relating to these strange numbers, and the answer must clearly be that they are both to be seen in a cycle and that, possibly without knowing about it, Armstrong has stumbled into a set of cycles which are, in effect, ratified by the Bible. Is this why they are so accurate and why he is so highly sought after to advise nations like China?

I shall also make references, as the reader will see as he or she progresses throughout the various segments and CHAPTERs, to Armstrong’s major work: the war cycle. This horrible thing he has worked on for a long time, and apparently it goes back, in one form or another, for centuries.

It shows, for a reason which I do not fully understand, that mankind engages in war—either directly or indirectly—every quarter century. I do not mean a life-and-death struggle for the very fate of the human race, but rather we see one of three things: a major conflict, a medium-sized one (à la Korea), or else a major change of a dominant philosophy somewhere in the world that has a major global impact.

Let me give you an example of this, just dating back to the early twentieth century. In 1914, and we see the centenary of this in 2014, was the First World War (the Great War, as it is known in Britain), which started in August of that year (The Guns of August is a major work describing this terrible conflict). In 1939, just after the end of August, we saw the German invasion of Poland, which started the Second World War. That is to say, twenty-five years after 1914.

In August 1964, we saw a major decision by the powers that be in the United States (then at the very zenith of its global authority politically, culturally, and economically) to start the ball in motion for the desperately expensive and divisive war in Southeast Asia: Vietnam.

At that time, the Pentagon carried out what we might describe today as a False Flag operation in the Gulf of Tonkin, which led to the first US incursions into that country early in 1965 (after the presidential election in November 1964, the cynic might add). In 1989 there was no war, but the collapse of communism under the last significant Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would certainly qualify as a major change in how the world is run, in my book.

As an aside here, I should note that many people (me among them, as I have written about in my newsletter) feel that the collapse of communism was some sort of staged event and that some years down the road we shall see it, or a close cousin, reemerge.

Now we come to 2014, which is, as noted, the centenary of World War I. It is a war cycle year, and while we came close to something happening in Syria and the Middle East in 2013, the cycles were not correct then. We have moved to 2014, where the ongoing ruckus in the Ukraine (as this is being written) is threatening to explode into all sorts of nasty things.

We should look for something to happen in the last six months of this year, as Armstrong has pointed out that this time of the year is not friendly to peace. Yep, have to agree with this one. Japan is also, for the first time since its shattering defeat in World War II, starting to flex its muscles in its area of the Pacific, and one wonders if there will be a clash between Japan and China before all of this is over. There might also be a clash in Korea again.

What defined Korea was its liberation from Japanese colonial oppression in 1945. The years 2014–1945 = 69 years, which almost exactly twenty-two times pi. Twenty-two is a number that I find very interesting as well, as we shall see just a little later on. I am left wondering if a sixty-nine-year gap in conflicts is also something we should carefully access as we move forward. Just for fun, 69/22 is also almost equal to pi (22 × 3.1416 = 69.115). Powerful stuff here! Please note that as the book goes on, I refer to pi numbers. A pi number is one that is almost exactly divisible by pi, and this means a great deal in my system of biblical pi analysis!

I shall refer to Armstrong’s work as I look at various economic cycles as they play out in the United States. Remember that because of the primacy of the US dollar