Headlines that 2015 was the “worst year for the market since 2008,” more market turmoil this week and concerns by financial experts about a possible global recession are a “striking confirmation of the Shemitah and its phenomenon,” New York Times best-selling author Rabbi Jonathan Cahn told Charisma News.
This week, media outlets worldwide reported that 2015 was the worst year for the financial markets since the last Shemitah and the financial crisis of 2007-08, and financial forecasters raised concerns about the potential of a global recession beginning this year. In addition, the year opened with global markets dropping precipitously, a phenomenon that resumed Wednesday, according to news reports.
“It’s the central revelation in The Mystery of the Shemitah,” Cahn said about his book detailing a seven-year biblical cycle that marked numerous economic downturns. “The fact that this confirmation is now coming from the secular media is all the more striking. We’ve never had so many secular sources confirming the central thesis of the Shemitah.”
Cahn’s book, The Mystery of the Shemitah, details how each of the last seven Shemitahs since 1966 were marked by recessions or stock and bond market crashes. The Shemitah, or Sabbath year, is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the land of Israel. Cahn first introduced readers to the Shemitah in The Harbinger that described how it related to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent historic stock market drops that year and in 2008.
Some people thought that there had to be an economic calamity in September, something The Mystery of the Shemitah never says.
“Many got sidetracked by putting all their focus on September and on a single-day crash of Wall Street they believed had to take place on a set date,” Cahn says. “I’ve cautioned from the beginning against date setting and the idea that anything had to take place on any date, season or in any year.
“But the predominant pattern of the book is not of a day crash that has to take place on a set day, but rather on a long-term crash or collapse of Wall Street, taking place over a period of months. And this is exactly what happened in the Shemitah of 2015. The market peaked in the spring and then began a long-term collapse over months into the summer. The effect of the Shemitah of 2015 was so great that by its end, it had wiped away $11 trillion dollars from world markets.”
Another part of the template revealed in the book is that the effects of the Shemitah intensify as the year approaches the Hebrew month of Elul, or August and September.
“This, too, is exactly what took place in the Shemitah of 2015,” Cahn says. “This year, Elul began on August 16. Less than 10 days after its start, the world would witness one of the greatest collapses in Wall Street history and, beyond that, in world history, with the onslaught of Black Monday.
“It is not that something had to happen this year, or that the phenomenon had to manifest in every cycle—but the fact is—it did. That phenomenon concerns a specific biblical seven-year cycle of financial, if not economic, downturn. And now, as we begin 2016, financial sites and news services all over the world are proclaiming that 2015 was the ‘worst year for the market since 2008.‘ It’s an extremely powerful confirmation. As 2008-2015 is exactly that—a seven-year cycle. And not just a seven-year cycle, but the specific seven-year cycle ordained in the Bible, the cycle of the biblical Shemitah.”
Cahn’s remarks come amid a stock market rout on Monday that saw market indexes drop hundreds of points, including a 582-point Nikkei Stock Average drop in Asia and a 276-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Meanwhile, financial experts have raised questions whether a global recession is beginning. “Could the Economy Tank in 2016?” a Politico headline asked. “Brazil Heads for the Worst Recession Since 1901, Economists Forecast,” Bloomberg reported.
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