A Note From the Chairman on FSC's Cycles in the City '26

Dr. Richard Smith, FSC Chairman

A Note From the Chairman on FSC's Cycles in the City '26

Dear FSC Friends,

Cycles in the City '26 is in the books. What I didn't expect — though perhaps I should have — was that it would be even better than last year.

Seeing so many faces from 2025 return made it feel like a reunion. And watching some of the legends of market cycles in our midst — clearly enjoying themselves, clearly engaged — reminded me why this community is unlike any other. Everyone brought their A game and it really showed.

Twenty speakers. Three days. A room full of people who have staked their professional reputations on the reality of cycles. What happened when we put that much rigorous, convergent thinking together was not easy to predict in advance. But the direction was unmistakable.

The direction was toward each other.

I don't mean that sentimentally. I mean it analytically. Speaker after speaker — using completely different methods, different data, different theoretical traditions — arrived at the same window: 2027 to 2030. Michael Howell's global liquidity cycle troughs there. Larry Williams' century-scale cycle peaks there. Akhil Patel's 18-year real estate cycle crests now and rolls over into it. Andrew Pancholi's geopolitical cycles converge on it from four independent directions. John Bollinger's 16-year expansion-consolidation pattern puts the end of the current expansion squarely in that range.

None of these people coordinated their forecasts. Most of them had not previously compared notes. The convergence was not manufactured. It emerged.

And that is exactly why I want to be careful about it.

The most seductive thing a cycles researcher can encounter is agreement. When independent methods converge, it feels like confirmation. Sometimes it is. But we owe it to ourselves to ask the harder question: Is the convergence telling us something about the world, or something about us? I don't believe it's the latter — the methods were too different, the researchers too independent — but the discipline of asking is the price of being taken seriously. Larry Williams said it plainly: Most cycle "discoveries" are curve-fitting in disguise. Lars von Thienen named it the "cycle trap." Peter Borish reminded us that more data makes yesterday more explainable without making tomorrow more certain. We should hold our convergence and our skepticism in the same hand.

Beneath the agreement on when sat a deeper and less settled question: why.

This is the question I care about most, and it divided the room in the most productive way. Some presenters don't need a cause — Stan Harley studies kinematics and leaves dynamics alone. Others are built on mechanism — Janne Miettinen's hormonal oscillations, Chris Carolan's tides, Michael Howell's debt refinancing. I've come to believe this question is not academic. A cycle you understand the cause of is a cycle you can trust when the world changes. A cycle you've only pattern-matched will hold right up until the moment it doesn't. Tom McClellan drew the line most clearly: natural frequencies endure; induced frequencies vanish when the forcing changes. The two look identical in the data. Only understanding tells them apart.

Which brings me back to why any of this matters.

A convergence on 2027–2030 is not a prophecy. If it were, there would be nothing to do but wait. The thing our founders glimpsed in 1941, and the thing we are recovering now, is that cycles don't only tell us what happens next. They tell us what we might do next. Order matters. We are not spectators to these patterns — we are inside them, and how we act is part of what they become. That is not a burden. It is the reason the work is worth doing.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for bringing your best. The conversations that happened in that room — and in the hallways, over dinner, and in the library at Baruch — have already changed what happens next. That was not incidental to the conference. It was the conference.

I can't wait to see what we do with it.

It's about time,
Dr. Richard Smith
FSC Chairman of the Board and Executive Director