The last twenty-five years -- since 1929 -- have seen an unprecedented expansion of economic and financial theories and systems. Hundreds of methods for analysing and forecasting price and market trends have sprung up, creating an army of experts, trained to analyse economic and banking factors, and to apply their finding to industry levels.
In this period, the art of statistical and economic evaluation has devoloped tremendously, but even with the best minds at work , such analyses leave a gap between evaluating past performance and postulating future developments. The new psychological approach to trend analysis here outlined fills this gap. It has the inherent predictive content required by any business that must plan ahead, but it is not a system of forecasting in the usual sense.
What this new approach provides is a basis for setting up present and future policies against:
- Knowledge of the factors at work in past and current trends of mass psychology.
- Foreknowledge of the basic, coming changes in trend of mass psychology, covering a period reaching far enough ahead to allow for long term planning.
Its discovery and development date bask to 1930, when after ten years' experience in selling bonds and managing investment accounts, I stepped aside from my position and connections, impelled by the desire to find out why and how such major cataclysms as had recently upset the entire world could occur.
I consulted economists and financial experts of the period, only to find them as confused as I was. I read every available book on economics and related subjects, studied every current type of market analysis -- all this, without finding an answer to my question: what makes markets go up and down?
This convinced me that the answer should lie, if anywhere, in a field which no on has yet had explored in this connection -- mass psychology, the changing attitudes of people, the way they tkink and feel about economic, political, and general conditions.
A change in trend arises from a change in attitude on the part of the general public. Events do not create attitudes; they synchronize with their results, which misleads many thinkers. Witness the difference in response from the public to World War One, World War Two, and the Korean War. To the first, flag-waving enthusiasm; to the second, half-hearted obligation; to the third, apathy. Similar chunges of public attitude are clearly discernible in the financial and economic areas of response -- such as the change between the exuberant twenties and the fear-ridden thirties. So what seemed necessary, in the problem of understanding fluctuating markets and economic trends, was a formula that would time and analyse these changing attitudes -- past, present, and future.
The first clue appeared in what is called the synchronic principle of history: the fact that similar conditions consistently arise in different parts of the world at the same time, even centuries ago, when communications were negligible. This focussed attention on time, which led the work into an area outside the bounds of orthodox thought. The only available system directly concerned with time was the one known as astrology. This system was therefore investigated, carefully studied, and tested.
As other investigators have found, the traditional form and interpretation of astrology proved unsatisfactory and had to be discarded. But this investigation was unusually thorough. And in the basic essentials of this system, reached by very few investigators, a logical connection with the principles of modern physics, particularly with the Unified Field Theory, took shape and immediately began to give results.
Just as beauty is created from unusual materials -- like nylon from crude oil -- so certain fundamentals of an often discredited theory, which has survived through centuries of thought, produced, when combined with accepted principles of modern electronics, a pattern of natural trends, timed as to points of change, both past and future. The basic psychological quality of each trend can be interpreted by means of formula inherent in the pattern.
In the light of this interprative formula, extraordinary periods, such as the dynamic twenties and the collapsing thirties, could be perceived as phenomena growing out of a natural sequence of changes in mass psychology, a sequence which has been going on, in orderly fashion, a long as recorded history. Carried back broadly over about century, the pattern showed consistent results. It was found that points of change in the trend pattern coincided with critical periods of change in world affairs -- revolutions, major wars, depressions, etc., -- and also with periods of peace, prosperity, and progress, in logical sequence, and always capable of reasonable interpretation.
Hindsight being admittedly deceptive, current events, over the past eighteen years, have been closely observed in relation to the indications given by the pattern -- timing in advance the points of change, analysing and interpreting the changing attitudes as they took hold of the public mind. In actual experience the results were astonishingly accurate. Turning points in Stock Market action and in the F.R.B. Index of Production -- two indices which are matters of public record, furnishing visible and immediate evidence of the psychological trend -- were found to coincide closely with turning points of public attitude as indicated in advance, by the
pattern.Now, in April, (1954) the indications are that we are going through the first phase of a major, world-wide transition from a psychological mood that has been dominant for many years, to a totally new attitude toward practically everything. Many people feel this, instinctively; our contribution is to translate feeling into logical understanding of what is going on, withh clear perception of its implications relative to coming changes in the public mood.
This work is based on a practical application of Einstein's Unified Field Theory, which postulates the existence of a continuous "field," extending through space. The bodies moving through space -- including the earth -- are themselves only highly concentrated parts of the field.
In other words, this earth of ours, like every other body in the system, is a charged body centering a field of force, which can be described as a field of radio-magnetic activity. This field, to the physicist -- and to us, who are not physicists -- is "as real as the chair on which he sits." The field of the earth is constantly changing in potential, frequency, etc., or, as Dr. Einstein puts it, "the field changes with time." He also says that "not the behaviour of the bodies, but the behaviour of something between them, that is, the field, may be essential for ordering and understanding events."
The Hasbrouck research has produced a definite system for timing certain of these changes in the field of the earth, as well as a practical interpretation of what these changes mean in terms of changing human attitudes and their resultant effects in human affairs.
Other areas of research have provided considerable evidence for the validity of our approach. Dr. H. C. Burr, in experiments at Yale, has proved a direct connection between the forces operating in the field of the earth and the structure of nervous systems of all living things. We ourselves discovered, and proved, in the nineteen thirties, a connection between changing forces in the field, measured by our newly-discovered pattern, which made it possible to predict periods of radio transmission disturbance. A similar formula is now in daily use by R.C.A. transmission engineers, and other institutions.
Thus it can be seen that the basis of this new approach to trend analysis is natural and fundamental, entirely apart from matters of opinion. Because of its coherent, integrated structure, its application is simple, requiring only logical discussion and an open mind.
Any enterprise, in order to succeed, must function within the framework of the current psychological demand, and plans for this functioning must be laid well in advance.
Such planning can be undertaken with confidence by utilizing the knowledge available through the application of this new trend discovery to any problem, situation, or undertaking requiring dependable knowledge of the ever-changing public demand -- local, world-wide, past, present, and future.
LOUIS HASBROUCK
319 East 50th Street
New York 22
Plaza 8-1998 -- Tel.