Ben Bernanke
American economist (born 1953)
The numbers
2 + 5 = 7
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 4, 6, 8. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 7 — The Seeker
Seven is the analyst and the mystic at once — the tradition assigns it both, and does not treat that as a contradiction. It is read as the number of depth, solitude and the refusal to accept a surface explanation. Its difficulty is distance: the withdrawal that makes the thinking possible is read as coldness by everyone outside it, and 7 is described as being misunderstood more often than it is disliked.
Complete lines
Line of Expression
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Resolve
The 1-5-9 diagonal complete. Read as determination that survives the middle of a project, when the initial energy has gone and the result is not yet visible.
Line of Sensitivity
The 3-5-7 diagonal complete. Read as emotional and intuitive range — the line practitioners associate with artists and with people who register what is unsaid.
Repeated numbers
1 appears 3 times
Concentrated self-direction. Read as conviction that does not need external agreement — and does not always seek it.
What is missing
Missing 4
Read as impatience with structure and maintenance. Associated with starting well and leaving the scaffolding to someone else.
Missing 6
Read as a complicated relationship with obligation — either avoiding it or over-shouldering it, rarely a settled middle.
Missing 8
Read as discomfort with power and money — not incapacity, but an unwillingness to claim authority openly.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 4 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 7 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Rahu
The ascending lunar node — a shadow graha, not a physical body. Disruption, ambition, the unconventional. Read with more caution than any other.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
There's no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.
The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve System. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.
House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals, including robust growth in jobs and incomes, low mortgage rates, steady rates of household formation, and factors that limit the expansion of housing supply in some areas.
To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.
Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much. However, careful economic analysis does have one important benefit, which is that it can help kill ideas that are completely logically inconsistent or wildly at variance with the data. This insight covers at least 90 percent of proposed economic policies.
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