Saturn, Pluto and the Postponed Recession

At the end of September, Saturn will start to move forwards again, closely followed by Pluto. Jupiter will have gone direct a couple of weeks earlier. These 3 planets conjoined in January, and marked the beginning of the Covid crisis. So we will be entering a new phase in a month, and I think that will mark the transition to a recession proper. So far it has been held at bay by government furlough schemes and, probably, by the public spending much of the money it saved during lockdown.

By paying the wages of struggling businesses, governments are saving them from going bankrupt. But they can only do this for so long, and Covid shows no sign yet of going away. So I think the theme across the West this autumn will be the winding down of furloughs and subsidies, increasing numbers of businesses going under, and unemployment rising. The recession proper will have begun, as Saturn's forward motion in Capricorn brings a dose of realism to world economies.

The hardship for many that this will involve is the price we will be paying for the lives saved by lockdown. How much this has also been a postponement - of people dying from Covid later rather than sooner - remains to be seen, as does our view of the lockdown as it ends, and whether it was worth it. At present this discussion is hard to have because many people have been frightened into thinking of Covid as a deadly disease, rather than the nasty bug with a low mortality rate that it actually seems to be.

We have been trained to think of recessions as bad, and booms as good. But recessions reflect the natural need to go inward and reconsider and attend to our underlying values, after a period of outward expansion. In this way Saturn embodies natural law.  

The current recession began with lockdown, and has been given added transformative power by the presence of Pluto. This is no ordinary recession. Saturn-Pluto is a powerful transit that marks a transition from one era to another. It will be a different world that we will be waking up to at the end of this year, as Saturn finally moves into Aquarius and away from Pluto. The Saturn-Jupiter cycle, which begins anew in December, also marks the beginning of a new era.

So, come the new year, we will be thinking about life as before and after Covid. Already we see the huge boost that this has given to the big tech companies - Apple is now worth more than the top 100 UK  companies combined - while the High Street spirals downwards as people shop more online. Fear has stalked the land in a way not seen in Europe since WWII, and this will be burnt into the collective psyche for some time to come.

Political eras will come to an end, inevitably, as the world moves into its new phase. Merkel is on her way out anyway. It is hard to see Trump surviving with his consistent trailing in the polls, and the likelihood of the recession becoming more real between now and the US election. Is Boris Johnson part of the new order, or part of the old order? He has at least another 4 years in office - short of a resigning issue like Suez arising - and I think he is strategically too sure-footed for that, flawed as he is in the details of day-to-day management. Starmer is not a performer - a vital ingredient for political success - and Boris (like Blair before him) will have Neptune on his side in the coming years. So I think that Boris is part of the new order. 

The US will undergo its Pluto Return in 2022. This will be in its 2nd House (Sibly Chart). So expect a big psychic wobble about its place in the world, as China emerges from Covid hotter on America's heels than expected. What is it to be American if you are not No 1 in the world?

SATURN AND THE STOCK MARKET

Saturn is currently going backwards at the end of Sagittarius. When a planet is going backwards (retrograde) it’s good to be thoughtful, and get things sorted for when the planet goes forwards again.

The most well-known retrograde phenomenon is Mercury, which happens 3 times a year for 3 weeks at a time. It’s when things notoriously go wrong, particularly Mercurial things like travel arrangements or vehicles or phones or paperwork. And it can create a sense that the planets work in a fated way. But I think it’s more like underlying problems get revealed, and if we pay attention to that, then we can move forward again once the planet does. And if we aren’t thoughtful in that kind of way, it will just seem like things are determined to go wrong.

I think there IS a fated element that astrology reveals, in the sense that it is, say, next month not this month that it is time to address certain things. But there is also free will and neither contradicts the other, even though they seem to. It is one of those apparent contradictions that is good to live with, it makes our mind more flexible, more subtle, less inclined to need everything pinned down.

On a collective level, thoughtfulness is an unusual quality. So collectively, we usually have to learn things – if we do – the hard way. And I think we are seeing this with Saturn in Sagittarius and the stock market. Sagittarius is a sign that likes to expand, but if it does so under Saturn retrograde in that sign, it points to inflation, a bubble, rather than genuine expansion, based on underlying realities. At the same time, we have also had a square between Jupiter and Pluto, and this leads to the same kind of problem.

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A report was issued by one of the big financial bodies a few days ago, pointing out that we had not dealt with the underlying debt problems that the financial crash of 2008/9 revealed. Western countries are just as indebted now as they were at that time, and the response has been to keep interest rates very low, so that debts can be serviced, rather than corporations and individuals going bust. But it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Since then, this problem has spread to the East. China now has high levels of debt as well.

DOW JONES 2012-17

This problem of debt, combined with Saturn’s final days in Sagittarius, and the end of the Jupiter-Pluto square, points to a correction to the stock market, which has had a long bull run. In late August, Saturn will start to move forward into Capricorn, and there is no stronger signature for a reality check than this. Saturn, the planet of proportionality and rectitude and responsibility, in its own sign of Capricorn.

It will also point to the final economic outcome of the Uranus-Pluto square, which began at the time of the 2009 crash, revealing the problems, problems which as I say we have still not dealt with, only delayed.

As Saturn enters Capricorn, it will begin to move towards a conjunction with Pluto in that sign in 2½ years time. Not long. So the stock market check that is soon to begin will not be temporary, it will be ushering in a major restructuring over the next few years. In the UK, people are understandably fed up with austerity. But we have been living beyond our means ever since the last Labour government failed to control the banks, and was forced to bail them out at huge cost. Other governments also failed in their job. But that doesn’t excuse our government, and the Chancellor in the years leading up to it, Gordon Brown.

So there will be a new economic order on its way as Saturn enters Capricorn and moves to conjoin Pluto. Austerity is not yet over. The stock market will go down, and there may be a recession. These things often happen in a panicky way. But overall I think it will be more of a significant correction than a crash, because that is the nature of Saturn and Capricorn. And the bubble is not huge: the Dow Jones is only about 25% higher than it was in the bubble of 1999.