Up to 2.51 this morning. sigh, I knew this is what they were doing, but it still bugs me.

I find it interesting that a Democratic win is stablizing the Market, normally the Business community is a bit more Right leaning, but I think possibly they object to the war as much as the rest of the country, it has Not (contrary to what one might think) been good for business. in fact only three DOD companies have made much profit in this at all, And one of those is more SAudi Owned that US...

Interestingly it was noted on a fixed star Page that the only really new and really strong alignment for election day was the Sun with Alpha Librae...

Granny

Nope, this Solar eclipse did not perform in any way comparable with 1987, and neither did Mars through Libra or the stations and retrograde motion of Mercury topple the balance either. In perspective and retrospect it might be possible to put the pieces together and spot the differences. But better to let the market run along at own accord for the present. I'll post and update when things figure out.

Thought it worth returning to this thread in the light of the last six months events. Some of what follows is more finance than astrology but think it is important for anyone reading this thread to get the whole picture.

Most of the discussion was about stock markets but Andrew?s heading was ?Financial markets? and what has become clear is the importance of that broader heading. He pretty much got the timing spot on.

Certainly there were some tricky moments in September/October which resulted in the collapse of an energy hedge fund but that didn?t spill over this time and most things appeared to keep going and the stock markets certainly boomed for a few months until lately when they have become more jittery.

However, the eclipses of that time, together with the first pass of the Saturn Neptune opposition basically set in motion the demise of the housing market bubble in the US. The on-going lunations from then till January have coincided with swings in opinion from pessimism to blind optimism (the latter incidentally still propping up the stock markets). However the recent eclipses and the renewal of the Sat/Nep opposition have finally sealed the fate of those house prices. Basically, for those who have not been keeping track, the stagnation and in some cases falls in the home prices have caused the collapse of the ?subprime? mortgage sector ? that, for the uninitiated, is when banks etc lend to people who can?t afford to pay!! It works during a bubble and obviously fails abysmally once normal conditions resume.

In tandem with this the dollar has fallen. So the currency markets have also hit. (These are obviously relative markets; currencies can?t all fall, at least one must go up versus the others).

So given that the 6 months cycle of lunations at 28/29 and 13/14 between the September and March eclipses are now over can we relax? I don?t think so, as I think that the Saturn and Neptune opposition has more grief to bring to these markets. I suspect June to bring more US hedge fund difficulties and that the dollar will not recover (although it may stabilise for a little while). I also expect that we will look back in 6 months time and see the same house price problem in the UK started unravelling now (Q1 2007). The Saturn Neptune opposition is now almost opposite the UK 1801 Saturn; bad for UK house prices and I think also bad for Sterling
( vs. Yen & Euro anyway) in the long run.

But what this all really represents is a much bigger problem ? that of excessive credit.
So I also think that we will look back at last September and Andrew?s comments, in a couple of years, and see it as correctly signalling the end of the expanding economic cycle. The stock market growth since will be seen as an aberration due to bad information about how truly bad things are. Now there are two routes these economies can follow ? higher costs of borrowing or currency collapse. The latter allows the stock markets to continue to rise (at least in local currency terms) the former is likely to result in stock market stagnation/declines. When this will exactly happen can be the topic of another thread but the real turning point will always be September /October 2006.

Obviously this is the half way point in the Saturn Neptune Cycle which started in 1989, and in the financial sense Saturn and Neptune together relate to widespread interrelated financial obligations. But it also can?t be separated from the Pluto Saturn 1982-2020 which has created huge debt structures. Thus I would be inclined to think that what is happening now is taking us down the path into the next challenges of that Pluto Saturn cycle in 2009-10. And then of course to the cardinal cross with Pluto and Uranus ? the first real challenge to the current global economic structures since decades of expansion of multinationals in general and financial institutions in particular. Lovely. (as a Scorpio sun, with moon in Taurus, I like nothing better than a nice financial crisis ).

Thank you for all your observations!

Of recent date I noted that several markets bottomed at the lunar eclipse of March 3. Prior to this I was looking for a top around the full moon following the solar eclipse of March 19. - bringing us to April 2.

My focus has been on other things than the financial markets of late but I called the significance of the turning-point in the stock market March 3. for the editor of the Norwegian financial website Hegnar Online. My anticipations now go back to my initial queries regarding a top on April 2. I believe the investor may keep this in mind and hold it as a relevant control point.