The U.S. Saturn Return (Part Two)
The stock market is a capricious beast, skittish as a fawn in some circumstances and in others seemingly oblivious to the most glaring signs of danger. It proceeds at its own irrational pace, following whims and sudden burst of sentiment up and down Dow Jones Average. During the past several years that progress has mostly been in an upward direction. Through two changes in administrations, the COVID pandemic and various economic troubles the stock market has continued to rise, setting records and generating huge profits for a select coterie of investors.
Throughout this period we’ve heard various experts predict an end to this phenomenal “bull” market. So far, they’ve all been wrong. However, they are right about one thing. No bull market goes on forever. They all stumble at some point. And, sometimes, those stumbles turn into disastrous crashes that drag down the entire world economy. This is what happened in 1929 and in 2008. There are astrologers who feel that it is bound to happen again this year during the U.S. Pluto Return.
The conjunction of transiting Pluto to natal Pluto in the horoscope for the United States moved within a one degree range on Jan. 20. It will continue to be in that range for most of 2022 and much of 2023. However, some people feel that, given Pluto’s slow orbit, that one degree range is too narrow and that the influence of the aspect began months ago. If that is so, you can’t prove it by looking at the U.S Stock Exchange. There was a slight wobble with the Omicron variant was discovered in December and the rise of inflation has created some worries but there is still no hint of the kind of panic that could bring about a stock market crash.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. As I said in my last article, Pluto is the planet of transformation and a major decline in the stock market, along with the economic ruin that would likely follow, would certainly be a transformative event. The 1929 stock market crash, for example, derailed the careers of a entire generation. It deprived older Americans of the savings and middle-aged Americans of the prime earning years. However, it may have been the young people who suffered the most. The Great Depression seriously delayed of their transition into adulthood. Many had to move back in with their parents. The number of marriages sharply declined and the birth rate plummeted.
We also have to remember that both the 1929 crash and what happened in 2008 took most people, even some people who should have known better, by surprise. The fact that the stock market seems to on the rise this week doesn’t mean that some shift in the economic weather won’t send it into a precipitous decline next week or next month, or maybe even tomorrow. Like the skittish fawn I mentioned in the first paragraph, once the panic set in there’s no stopping it.
So it is that, among the transformative possibilities that could come out of this Pluto Return, we have to include a stock market crash. However, there is another issue we have to consider in connection with this possibility. That issue is the wealth gap. It so happens that the disparity between the wealth held by the top ten percent of our population and that held by the middle class and below recently reached a level that matches the gap that existed in 1929.
During the early 1930s, when the bleak facts of the Great Depression were beginning to settle in, there concern among some government officials at the city, state and even federal level that starving workers would rise up in rebellion. The “Bonus Army” that descended on Washington in 1932 was one indication of this, but some officials feared something much worse. The mayor of Chicago, for example, begged President Hoover to sent him federal troop to stop a socialist uprising that he claimed was imminent.
But it never happened. Poor Americans of that period did not rise up in protest. Instead, for the most part, they simply accepted that times were hard and that there was nothing to do but hunker down and try to survive. If they blamed anyone for their troubles, they blamed themselves.
Here is my worry. If it turns out that the transformation that the Pluto Return brings us is a second Great Depression, I am not at all sure that the current population of American, particularly the younger generations, will be so docile and forgiving of those in charge, and that could open to door to a whole different level of transformation.
