By: Michelle Lodge
CNBC.com Writer
Technical analyst Charles Nenner, who sees a correlation between sunspots and the stock market and other types of activity, told CNBC Tuesday that there would be a major military conflict starting at the end of 2012 or in early 2013.
“If you look in history, there are certain wars that lead to a bull market and certain wars that lead to a bear market,” said Nenner, who is founder and president of the Charles Nenner Research Center.
“It just depends where the cycle is. If the cycle is turning down [ward] and on top of that you have a military conflict, people are very much afraid and they make a negative interpretation of reality. So the connection between the sunspots is if the sunspots activity is low, then the mood is low and every reality that people come up with, they make a negative interpretation.”
In an interview Monday on CNBC Europe, Nenner said there would be a significant crisis in three years.
Nenner is known to be outspoken and somewhat unconventional in his views. Indeed last summer he predicted the Dow would plummet to 5,000. Nevertheless, he has a following in the investment community after he correctly predicted the top for the Dow in 2007, and has a reputation as a solid money manager.
Sunspots are dark areas of irregular shape on the surface of the sun and their short-term and long-term cyclical nature has been established in the past century, according to the Galileo Project, a science website administered through Rice University.
Nenner said sunspot activity can be tracked using the NASA website. According to Nenner, if there is a high intensity of sunspots, markets rise; if their intensity lowers, markets go down because sunspots affect people's moods.
Nenner said also that deflation would continue to a problem going forward, and that in 2011, the economy would improve for a few months and then backslide.
The attack may topple its stock market, or behead its government. The strike will bombard the nation's critical infrastructure and communications networks.
The precursors are already visible, the analyst firm said. It points to the network attacks on Estonia, Syria, Georgia, and Google as precursors to the pending cyber blitzkrieg.
"If a national stock market was rendered unavailable for several weeks … such disruptive actions could eventually result in a change in leadership," Gartner analysts wrote in a report.
"The impact of an online attack can be as lasting and deep as an attack conducted using legacy (ballistic warfare) means.
"Their impact will grow to the scale of a G20 country, and the disruptive effect will linger for months, rather than hours or days."
Potential hostiles could be nation-state security agencies, pseudo-national movements, terrorist organisations, or criminal or rebel groups.
Gartner predicted that gangs and drug cartels versed in kidnapping and killings may also turn to cyber attacks to ply their trade.
The industry is divided over the potential for cyber war. Pundits point to examples such as the alleged use of cyber attacks by Israel to disable Syrian radar systems, while others suggest it is a myth, a political tool, or an extension of conventional warfare that has existed for half a century.
But Gartner claims a cyber war could produce a demand for information security professionals.
"Governments will pass legislation and launch security-related initiatives [which] will boost the sector of the security industry that can provide protection. Consumers will seek protection, including privacy and security products and services, even though these might not be directly related to a cyber attack, nor will they necessarily be able to mitigate effects."
According to Gartner, also in 2015:
10 per cent of your online friends will be non-human.
Tools and automation will eliminate a quarter of IT labour hours.
IT spending per head will rise by 60 per cent in "information-smart" businesses.
Companies will generate half of online sales through social networks and mobile applications.
20 per cent of non-IT Global 500 companies will be cloud service providers and 80 per cent of enterprises using external cloud services will demand independent certification that providers can restore operations and data.
New revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most new global 2000 chief information officers.
Most external assessments of enterprise value and viability will include explicit analysis of IT assets and capabilities.
December 2nd, 2010, 18:01
American Patriot
Re: Major Military Conflict in 2012-2015
I can't really see how someone can correlate sun spots with war.
Full moons maybe.... /chuckles.
Seriously though. We can go back about 400-450 years on sunspot activity and know there were sun spots. We can't really go back much beyond that, frankly because the Chinese didn't keep records BEFORE that (and no one else bothered to look that closely at the sun...)
Also, there are times of high and low activity on the sun that humans would not have necessarily noted. In other words... we've lived through probably a dozen or more major abnormally high sun radiation events without even KNOWING about them, so how can we know they would have had an effect on the human population?
December 2nd, 2010, 18:02
American Patriot
Re: Major Military Conflict in 2012-2015
Quote:
"The impact of an online attack can be as lasting and deep as an attack conducted using legacy (ballistic warfare) means.
Nonsense.
They will fall back to paper and pencil. Like the did in the 1920s.
