Free The Mystery of the Shemitah by Jonathan Cahn Page B

Points
    T HE GREATEST HIGHS or peaks of the stock market constitute turning points—the ending of a period of expansion and the beginning of decline. A peak in the financial realm, by definition, will mark the beginning of a downturn or a collapse. A major descent in the stock market will often be connected to an economic collapse, either as its foreshadowing or its effect.
    If the financial and economic realms of ancient Israel could be plotted on a line graph, what would it look like? With the coming of the Shemitah, it would manifest as turning points, very similar to those appearing in a stock market graph. The Sabbath year would, in effect, produce a peak followed by a plummeting line. The descending line would represent the nation’s productivity as well as a “remission” in its financial realm.
    What happens if we now look at the greatest turning points, the highest apogees in the last forty years of stock market history, along with the key turning points in the economic realm, the recessions and economic downturns of that same period? What will it reveal?
    It will certainly include some of the great crashes of modern times, which we have seen in the last chapter—but much more. It will present a progressive record of the financial and economic fortunes of America and the world over the last several peaks and crashes in the order in which they occurred. It will provide a clear and large-scale view of the timing of each turning point as well as the relationship of each turning point to the others.
    The data relating to the financial realm will come from the list of the stock market’s greatest turning points, its greatest peaks, and troughs of the past forty years. Will any pattern emerge? And is it possible that there will exist any connection to the ancient cycles ordained in the sands of Sinai?

    In the last forty years there have been five major peaks and turning points in stock market history.
    First Turning Point: 1973

    The first turning point comes at the start of 1973. On January 11 the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500 reached a peak of 120. The market then began a long descent through the rest of the year and through much of the following year. It hit bottom on October 3, 1974, at a level of 62. The loss represented 48 percent of the market’s value. The collapse in the financial world foreshadowed and then overlapped with a collapse in the economic realm and a severe global recession.
    Second Turning Point: 1980

    The second turning point happened on November 28, 1980, as the S&P 500 reached a level of 140. After this, came a long descent through all of 1981, reaching its low point on August 12, 1982, at 102, the stock market having lost 27 percent of its value. This collapse had been preceded by an earlier one in 1980, when the Dow Jones Industrial dropped from a level of 903 on February 13 to a low of 759 on April 21.
    But the turning point in the financial realm would be preceded by another in the economic realm in January of 1980 as the economy entered a severe recession. This has been thus called a “double-dip recession,” and although there would later be a slight recovery, the economy would resume its downward slide in July of 1981. The collapse would affect much of the developed world and witness the highest levels of unemployment since the Great Depression.
    The economic crisis had begun even earlier in 1979 as the Iranian Revolution triggered a massive spike in oil prices. The period from 1979 to the beginning of 1980 was one of stagflation, rising inflation combined with declining output growth. During this time the nation’s gross national product (GNP) shrank from 5 percent to 1.5 percent. It was 1979 as well that saw the nation’s rate of inflation soar into double digits.
    So here we have a clustering of turning points. The economic crisis crystalized in 1979, became a worldwide recession in January 1980, and resulted in the fall of the stock market in November of that same