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Lucky Seven Is Not So Lucky These Days
There's been a lot of talk of sevens in the last few weeks or so -- since about seven years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
It began with Hank Paulson, who proposed a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street.
The market responded to the plan's failure to pass the House of Representatives with a drop of 777 in the Dow Jones industrial average.
When the bill finally did pass, 171 (notice the seven) members of Congress voted against it.
And all this bad stuff happened in the seventh month of the year, on the old Roman calendar (September is derived from "septum," meaning seven in Latin), seven weeks past the anniversary of the credit crunch.
Is seven no longer a lucky number? Just last year, seven was the luckiest number, a year in which 7-7-07 (July 7, 2007) was, among other things, the most popular date in years for matrimony, with triple the usual number weddings scheduled on a day that holds positive significance across several cultures, including Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, and China.
And, just to point out a few historical items, seven has rocked out other things too, including the number of colors in the rainbow, days of the week, bones in one's neck, wonders of the world -- and let's not forget the Seven Dwarfs.
So what's going on? Could it be an end-of-empire sort of thing (Rome had seven emperors) or Biblical (God created the earth in seven days)?
Numerologist Ruth Drayer, author of Numerology: The Power in Numbers, points to the number seven's spanning quality.
"Seven has a depth that represents a searching and seeking," Drayer says. "It is also a bridge between any two things you want to bridge."
So is that what it all means? "We are in a time of spanning, from one thing into something very new," she says.
Oh good. Just in time for Black October, everybody's favorite month.
by Laura Rich
Also on Portfolio.com:
- In Defense of Mark-to-Market Accounting
- The Duplicitous Sheila Bair
- Capital Index: Buy Bernanke, Sell Iceland
- Credit Crunched: A Special Report on Wall Street Chaos
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