The Crisis Season (Part 5)

Uranus and Pluto have been moving away from their square for a few weeks now, so I was expecting the sense of crisis to ease, but it hasn’t. The crisis over the Euro continues under that most ruthless of taskmasters, the markets. It is nominally over the threat of one small country, Greece, defaulting. If it does, then the bond markets will turn on Italy and Spain, and that will be a much bigger crisis. It is a world crisis, because the EU is the world’s biggest economic block, and the world is threatening to tip into another recession.

As I understand it, governments regularly borrow money to keep functioning, and eventually have to pay it back. They borrow in the form of government bonds from international markets. If the markets are not confident in that country's ability to pay back its loans, then it has to borrow at a higher interest rate. That makes it all the harder to pay back, because there are higher interest repayments along the way. It can be a vicious circle, because the higher the interest, the less is your ability to pay back, so lenders then want even higher interest. Without the ability to simply print more money (and devalue your currency), which is the usual way out, you are stuffed. And member countries of the Euro cannot do this. Greece is, to use the technical term, stuffed.

There will be deep financial restructuring over the next few years as Uranus and Pluto start to make some exact squares to each other. For now, the inevitable is being put off. It would be nice if part of that restructuring included restrictions on short-selling: this practice involves making bets on a price of a share going down. It’s like betting that the health of a hospital patient will get worse! And the worse they get, the more money you make. And if they die, well it was dead wood anyway that needed to go, and the betting probably helped. It is exactly like that. It encourages investors who don’t care about anyone or anything.

A few years ago, a rich English investor made a large bet on a referendum in Ireland going a particular way. He then donated money to an Irish political party that was pushing for the referendum to go the way that investor wanted. In the end, he lost the bet. But this investor is treated as a wise man in the City of London, a financial guru, famous amongst other things for making tens of millions out of the collapse of Bear Sterns. It’s a grisly way to earn a living when you think of the human consequences of a company collapsing. And the short-selling creates a climate where collapse becomes more likely. And it’s not even about earning a living, which has some merit. It’s about money for its own sake.

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When Pluto first entered Capricorn in Jan 2008, it was conjunct Venus and Jupiter in Capricorn. This says to me that the economic transformation that we are being slowly and painfully dragged through will involve Venus and Jupiter issues: that is, values and ethics. And in a Capricornian way: that is, values and ethics that also make long-term practical and financial sense. Short-selling is about short-term gain, and it can easily damage or kill companies or even whole economies unnecessarily. It was banned outright in England in the 18th century after shorting led to a major banking crisis.

Off my soapbox. The journalist John Pilger has a saying: “Don’t believe anything until it is officially denied.” Well it has now been officially denied that the EU will let Greece go to the wall and be pushed out of the Eurozone. This would not have been said unless it was strongly in Europe’s interest to offload Greece, and unless the possibility was being discussed in political circles.

It’s an impossible situation, because you have a common currency yet no central control over the individual Eurozone economies. A course of action cannot be plotted. Creating that central control is politically out of the question. In the meantime, German voters are increasingly against their country supporting the weaker economies. The only possibility indeed seems to be to let Greece go. But then the markets will turn on say Italy, which is also hugely indebted. And there’s no way the Germans, Europe’s paymasters, would be prepared to bail them out. So Italy will have to leave the Eurozone. And then Spain.

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The EU was founded as an organisation on 1st Jan 1958 at midnight. The Angles were at 29 degrees of the Mutable signs, which is the worst time to begin something, because it is a time when things are falling apart in preparation for the start of the Cardinal signs. The Iraq War began with the Angles at 29 degrees of the Mutable signs. Moreover, the EU Moon (the member countries) is natally square to Uranus, showing on the one hand a progressive idea, but also inherent instability, a fissiparous nature.

Later this year Uranus will station one degree away from hard aspecting these Angles, concluding a transit that has been going on for a few years, a period that has seen Uranian instability within the EU as the world financial crisis worsened. The Angles are actual, they are our basic connections to the world, and the EU has been shaken and loosened. As Uranus finishes his transit, we are likely to see the EU starting to split apart.

Next year, Uranus will move on to within 2 degrees of a square to the EU Sun. As the EU unravels, so too will the governing body of the EU (the Sun) start to fragment. The EU is not just a trading bloc: it was founded also on political ideals of a united Europe, beginning with a trading agreement between war-weary France and Germany. It is that political idealism, which was never going to be practical beyond a certain point between such different cultures, that is at the root of Europe’s problems, because any economist could have told you that the Euro could never work.

The chart above is for the EU as an organisation. The EU (or EEC) began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

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The Fire and Air emphasis of this chart shows the idealism – Sun in Aries opposite Libra Asc, Moon in Aquarius opposite Uranus. What is notable is the lack of earth. There is only Jupiter retrograde in Virgo in the 12th House, which for an earth placement is about as unearthy as you can get! The EU, on the other hand, is about as earthy and practical as you can get: Sun in Cap, Virgo Rising, Moon in Taurus. But the ideals behind it, arising out of the treaty of Rome, were never very practical.

The Euro itself, the cause of all the trouble, was formally launched in Frankfurt on 4 Jan 1999 at 4am. Because it is money, we need to look to the 2nd House, where sure enough we find an ambitious Sun in Capricorn. But the ruler of the House is Jupiter, which is in Pisces, square to 2nd House Mercury in Sag. This strongly suggests an idea that is inflated, that has got beyond itself.