The events: the 2015 economy, stock market crashes and spikes.
Date: Tishrei 5775 - Elul 5775.
Anyone who tries to summarize the last financial year will discover that it is not a simple matter and perhaps even a bit deceptive.
On the one hand, the Israeli stock market - like other stock markets around the world - is zigzagging sharply, and all the data and forecasts point to a negative trend that is only getting stronger.
On the other hand, tap-tap-tap, we have to admit that our situation is not really bad. We complain about the cost of living, but continue to shop vigorously; we lament the hard work and the many, but at every opportunity we jump for a weekend in one of the European capitals.
What else? Many of us are completely discouraged by the real estate market, but bank data shows that Israelis do not hesitate to take out high mortgages and purchase apartments.
Here are some numbers: The Bank of Israel recently reported that in July, the public took out mortgages worth 6.59 billion shekels - a significant jump of 321% in the volume of activity compared to July 2014.
Moreover, this is the second consecutive month in which the public has taken out mortgages in excess of 6 billion shekels a month. In fact, a record was also broken in June for the volume of mortgages taken out, reaching almost 7 billion dollars.
Honestly, if psychologists were to analyze Israelis based on the economic data of the past year, there's a pretty good chance they would diagnose them as being in extreme repression, or even a split personality. But who knows, maybe we're just going with life and what it has to offer us.
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But the matter does not end there. Ultimately, economics is a game of numbers, and a closer look indicates that the numbers, no matter how you look at them, are not playing in our favor.
Here's a small example: At the beginning of the year, after growth in the last quarter of 2014 jumped by 71%, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that growth in economic activity in the economy continued in the first quarter of 2015.
But the forward momentum has slowed down in a truly worrying way. The bureau's data published in the middle of the year already reported disappointingly that growth in the first quarter amounted to only 2.51 trillion won, and from there it only got worse. The data published in early August already indicated that the Israeli economy grew in the second quarter of 2015 at a rate of only 0.31 trillion won. In the current situation, the Ministry of Finance has been trying to formulate a plan in recent weeks to accelerate growth in the economy. Not really encouraging.
So when the situation at home is not promising, we can perhaps try to draw some encouragement from what happened in the world over the past year. But even here, the picture is pretty bleak.
Europe was busy this year with the Greek economic crisis and is currently focusing mainly on the waves of immigration, which are unclear as to how they will affect its economy in the future.
Russia's market has been faltering for several years and has shown no signs of recovery in the past year. The Russian economy has experienced the sharpest and longest decline this year in recent weeks, and if we go back to the cold numbers for a moment - in the past year the Russian currency has lost about half of its value and is now trading around 70 to the dollar, the biggest decline since 2003.
If we turn our gaze to the East, we will find that even a billion Chinese people will not help us there. China - a kind of black box in everything related to its government - surprised us in August with an extreme drop in prices, which led to steep price declines on all stock exchanges in the world.
Will salvation come from the US? It's hard to say.
What is certain is that this brief summary can be concluded with a fairly clear insight: From an economic perspective, the coming year will be very interesting and challenging for Israel, and certainly for the rest of the world as well.
• Sagit Fastman is the former economic correspondent for the newspaper 'Maariv''
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