Mundane Musings

Zip Dobyns

My interim newsletter has a name: Asteroid-World; straight and simple, just the subjects on which it will focus. The summer 1986 issue went out in mid-August to the names I had of people who had requested it. If I missed some of you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. One of the items in Asteroid-World was a purely speculative chart for Sarah Ferguson, the bride of Prince Andrew of England. A morning birth puts the progressed Moon opposite progressed Venus, conjunct the progressed south node of the Moon, and trine natal Jupiter for the wedding. Fran McEvoy has acquired a chart just about an hour earlier, giving the same aspects but changing the angles about half a sign. I don’t know yet whether it is “A” data or speculation like mine, but it looks quite reasonable. I had picked a birth time which put the progressed MC on the natal Sun in the tenth house for the wedding. Fran’s chart puts the progressed Sun and Juno on the natal Ascendant and Pallas. Her progressed MC would be on the north node of the Moon. They are both appropriate aspects for the limelight and a marriage, but may just mean that astrologers agree on a few basic principles. Sarah’s date is October 15, 1959 in a small town that is not in the International Atlas but is said to be some 40 miles from London. Both Fran and I ran our charts for London which would be her local cusps in any case. Fran’s time is 9:03 A.M. UT.

One of the speakers I heard at the UAC (San Diego conference in June) was Ray Merriman. Ray is now working for Prudential-Bache, managing an office in Michigan. His recent forecasts have been “right on”, including a newsletter he handed out at the talks in which he had predicted ahead of time the volatility of commodities and the markets at the time of the Mars station in early June, and an oral prediction he made in the June lecture that the Market would have a correction in July up to 200 points on the DOW. Right on schedule, the DOW dropped well over 100 points, and then started up again in early August. Ray showed graphs of the market rises and falls during the 1920s and during the 1980s (so far). The parallels were amazing! But if Ray is right, we are currently just up to the equivalent of 1927 and we should have one more big rise in the market. Ray thinks the DOW may make 2300 before the bottom falls out in late 1987 or 1988.

During the July 1986 “correction” of the market, the progressed Moon of the original May 17, 1792 chart was on the MC if we accept the noon time. Since I consider the MC to be similar in principle to Saturn though planets are more important than anything else in the chart, a dose of anxiety and caution seems quite appropriate for some retrenching. If the noon time for the market chart is accurate, the progressed Ascendant reaches progressed Pluto in November 1986, and the progressed Moon moves into a two-month square to the Ascendant. This combination should indicate movement, whether up or down. Progressed Uranus holds a T-square to natal Pluto and Mercury for years, in mutable houses in the noon chart. The progressed Ascendant reaches natal Pluto to set off the fixed T-square more exactly in early 1988, soon after transiting Uranus and Saturn move into Capricorn. Since we have published the market chart in the past, I assume that readers who are interested in it already have it. The progressed Mars quincunx to natal Uranus certainly fits the current volatility of the market. Ray may well be right about another rise before the big downer. With interest rates dropping and tax loopholes being removed, the rich that Reagan has helped to become richer as well as the big pension funds, insurance companies, etc., are looking for investments that have some potential for appreciation in value. However, there still could be a massive correction in the market in the latter part of this year. Most of the charts I have studied suggest a tense time then, though the Libra Ingress puzzles me. It seems inflationary while most of the charts point to deflation. Of course many costs are still rising even while most commodities and many manufactured items are declining or stable.

An article in the August 26 Wall Street Journal is a report from a conference of governors expressing great anxiety about the U.S. economy. According to Albert Sindlinger, a consumer pollster who has been tracking economic conditions in the various states, 31 states accounting for half of the U.S. population are currently in recession. Only the coasts are doing well, and much of their success is dependent on military spending by the federal government at a cost of increasing debts. The consensus in most of what I read is that cutting the debt is essential but that it will push us into recession when the government cuts back on spending, and that the new tax proposals will help in the long run but in the short run will push us into recession. If half of the country is already in recession, then what? Farming went first, just as it did in the 1920s. But the “experts” said “don’t worry. There are very few farmers now. The rest of the country is OK.” They forgot that a lot of service businesses in small towns depended on the farmers around the towns. Manufacturing went next, but again the “experts” said that is a declining part of our gross national product and we can survive as a nation based on a service economy. But we are now buying commodities and manufactured products which we used to export, and who wants or can afford to buy our services? The federal government is adding about 200 billion to our debt every year and the import imbalance is adding another 150 billion. There is no way that any country can continue indefinitely to go into debt at that rate. Are we going to join Mexico in bankruptcy?

We can produce enough food and gadgets to permit everyone to live adequately, but we have not learned to share what we can produce. Workers are still being told that they must accept lower wages to make our products competitive and at the same time they must spend more to maintain the economy and they must save more to invest in still more productive machines which will make more money for the owners and displace more workers. ???

Most commodities are depressed and likely to stay down. Only gold and platinum are climbing, partly because the Japanese are putting more money into gold and because of the turmoil in South Africa which is a primary source for both metals. Platinum is needed in industry. The Japanese are buying gold partly because they are minting a large number of gold medals next year in honor of their Emperor. But also, with the rise in value of the yen, the Japanese can now buy gold for the equivalent of $250 while it costs $380 in U.S. dollars. With our interest rates and the value of our dollar going down, it makes sense for the Japanese to turn to gold and to reduce their purchases of U.S. securities. They have been selling us cars, TVs, video players, etc., and investing their profits in our debt instruments.

One of Volcker’s reasons for maintaining a “too high” interest rate is the need to keep people buying treasury bills and bonds to finance the U.S. debt. There is a limit to how low he can push interest and keep our government funded, not to mention our businesses which mostly operate on borrowed money. My newest financial newsletter comes from a man named Weiss in Florida, and he emphasizes that crunch between the need for borrowed money which pushes interest up to persuade the lenders to part with their funds, and the need of the borrowers for low interest in order to survive. Weiss claims that in a review of this whole century, every time the “real” interest rate (the difference between the nominal interest rate and the rate of inflation or deflation) rose over 3%, we went into a recession or a depression. When the “real” interest rate was less than 3%, especially when it was negative (inflation higher than the nominal interest), we went into increasing inflation. Weiss says that in view of the current deflation, the current “real” interest rate is as high as it has been in this century.

Weiss has been expecting a collapse in the economy for some years, primarily due to what he calls “the debt monster.” Astrology provides up with the tools which permit timing the consequences which we can see ahead. I have been saying for several years that we would be visibly sliding into the trough this year, that the end of the year was important, and also the spring of 1987, with late 1987 on into the early 1990s the real crunch period. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I recommend getting out of debt to the extent that you can, and emphasizing cooperation, mutual helpfulness, practicality, and hard work: the positive sides of Scorpio and Capricorn.

Postscript September 1986

Virgo ’86 was written in August, but delayed by a printer equipment failure. Meanwhile, the stock market fell out of bed over a month before I expected a major move and an accurate astrological forecast in the Millionaire’s Manual, a newsletter edited by Robert White in Cocoa, Florida, seemed important enough to include. On August 31, 1986, Arch (Sam) Crawford spoke for White’s Fort Lauderdale conference, predicting that the DOW JONES industrials would peak on September 3 or 4, and then would drop a minimum of 340 to a bottom sometime in November. He said that a 100 point drop in a single day was possible within a couple of weeks. One of our Los Angeles newspapers headlined BLACK THURSDAY, September 11, when the DOW dropped 86.61 points. The following day the DOW lost 34.17 more while markets around the world joined in the dive: Tokyo, London, Paris, and Toronto. Crawford had called the high to the day: September 4 when the DOW reached 1919.71, its all-time high. It fell smaller amounts on each of the next four trading days up to the 11th, for a total of a little over 40 points, so six trading days took it down over 160. Though the absolute figures are much higher, the percentage of the lost market value is only about a third of the massive loss in October 1929 that heralded the beginning of the depression in the 1930s.

Arch Crawford is a New York astrologer specializing in the market. Crawford showed the MM financial conference his record, claiming that he was correct to the week in calling the bottoms and tops 9 out of the last 10 times. Even his one supposed miss was correct to the day but turned out to be a peak, not a bottom as predicted. At the MM conference in Las Vegas on June 10, Crawford predicted a major drop in the first week of July (July 8 was the biggest drop in Market history to that date) and a bottom on August 6 (it came on August 4). He said on August 31 that he had not completed his research to determine the date in November when he expected the market to turn back up.

I had expected a turn (either up or down?) in late October or early November. Another major move seems possible in the latter part of March 1987, based on my own work. But I haven’t begun to put in the time that Arch has since I have too many interests to concentrate on just one. For readers who are into investing and have the funds to support their habit, the Crawford Perspective newsletter is available for $250 a year from 250 E. 77th. St., New York, NY 10221. I have been mostly watching the original New York Market chart for LMT noon on May 17, 1792. In that chart, the progressed Moon was going over the MC for the July drop, and had just entered 0 Gemini in early September, forming a trioctile to progressed Mars, a quincunx to progressed Neptune, an octile to Chiron, a sextile-trine to the true nodes of the Moon, and a sextile to progressed Chiron. The fire emphasis suggests impulsive action, either too much or too little faith. The quotidian (daily) angles on September 11 included QM conjunct the mean south node (Aries, 8th house); QA square Moon (also Aries, 5th house), in a yod (double quincunx) to progressed Mercury (Sagittarius, 4th house) and progressed Ascendant (Aquarius, 6th house), octile progressed Sun (Sagittarius, 4th house), and sextile-trine progressed true nodes. But stress aspects to the quotidian angles in the following week when the DOW went back up a few points show that one chart is not enough. I did also run the harmonic arcs for September 11 and found some dramatic aspects but lack space to cover them.

Copyright © 1986 Los Angeles Community Church of Religious Science, Inc.

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