We’re in a new paradigm, right? The stock market is going to keep going up, because central banks are going to keep printing money. This is the new normal, and we can keep ploughing our money into the markets, with no risk of losing. We also had a new paradigm in late 1999 and early 2000. The dot coms changed everything, and the internet was here to stay. Crazy valuations were OK, because the future was great.
I’m not an economist, so maybe I have got it wrong. This time it might really be different. However, the stock market fervour in 2020 seems very similar to 2000. Everyone was a stock market genius, provided they had the guts to plough their money into the lastest hot stock. And it is all happening while Jupiter and Saturn are working their magic.
In astrology Jupiter and Saturn are the Great Chronocrators, the rulers of time. Jupiter is the principle of expansion, Saturn the principle of contraction. Every 20 years they make a conjunction, and this can have a big impact on culture and economics. Looking back to 2000, there was a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn on May 28, and to understand what went on, we can graph the angular separation of the two planets:
This graph is for the first half of 2000. The black line is the angular separation of Jupiter and Saturn. At the beginning of the year the angular separation was around 15 degrees, and on May 28, when the planets were conjunct, it was zero. Through the first months of 2000, as the planets moved closer together, the stock market raced higher. Then, on March 10 2000, the NASDAQ index of technology shares peaked. That’s the horizontal red line. We can see this in tabular form, where the second column is Jupiter’s position, the third column Saturn’s:
The two planets were 8.75 degrees apart when the NASDAQ peaked. The index then declined, on and off, for three years. This means that as the planets came closer together, the markets became increasingly vulnerable to a shock. Jupiter, the planet of expansion, was running into Saturn, the planet of cold reality.
Moving on twenty years, we can look at Jupiter and Saturn’s angular separation over the course of 2020:
As in 2000, Jupiter and Saturn started 2020 being around 15 degrees apart. Through until late February the NASDAQ was rising, and then, with Jupiter and Saturn 9.5 degrees apart, it peaked, and continued falling for a month. By the time it stopped falling, the two planets were seven degrees apart. We then have the question of why it stopped falling, when Jupiter and Saturn were moving closer and closer together, reaching their peak proximity on May 19, at 4.68 degrees. I think part of the reason was that in the short-term, the move was never going to complete. The rate at which Jupiter and Saturn were approaching each other was slowing down, and from May 19 onwards they started moving further apart. Also, the activities of politicians and central bankers was enough to avert a more serious crisis. This underlines the fact that although humans can’t avoid their fate, they can often postpone it.
Right now, in July 2020, Jupiter and Saturn are moving further and further apart. This is why many people believe that the crisis is over. The pressure on Jupiter is dissipating, and the NASDAQ is moving to new highs. However, it is rather like a horror file. There is always a stage in the film when the heroine feels she can relax. She has escaped the supernatural monster, and things can return to normal. And that’s the point where the nightmare starts all over again, only this time it is ten times worse. When we look at the graph, we see that in the late summer Jupiter and Saturn have a peak distance from one another, and they then pick up speed, culminating in a conjunction on December 21. Here’s a table, showing the point of maximum distance:
On August 30 2020 Jupiter and Saturn are at the point of maximum separation. After August 30, we have the final run-up to the December conjunction. August 30 is a Sunday, and in the US it is a week short of Labor Day. This is the moment that things start getting serious, when it may be difficult to stave off the inevitable. August 30 is also the start of the crash season – the autumn being the most dangerous time of the year for the stock market. At this stage I am not going to make any detailed forecast, but I do thing that the twists and turns of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle provide the mood music for the economic and social drama that’s unfolding before us.