by
a21cent
@ Monday, 18. Feb, 2008 - 08:57:33 pm
On Channel 4 now, Dispatches: How the banks bet your money, is discussing the recent and current banking fiasco, and the 'sub-prime mortgage' screw-ups.
The scenes of derelict houses in the USA are very disturbing, but what's interesting is the commentary that the Bank of England knew 18 months before the crisis broke that there was an urgent need for drastic change in the banking system, so as to prevent such a crisis occurring - the government responded by doing nothing, and the Financial Services Authority stood by too.
The programme's discussed how the people working in the industry were ostriches to risks for a long time before things got anywhere near this bad. When the crisis started to bite, responses were far, far too slow.
The whole thing reeks of the Saturn-Neptune opposition. The Saturn-Neptune cycle is 36 years long. It resonates to themes of being short-sighted or long-sighted or alternatively both but never seeing just what's there clear as day. Halfway through the 36 year cycle is the opposition phase, which is crunch-time, the point of greatest divergence of reality and fantasy, the moment of greatest illumination and obviousness of how far we've strayed from common sense, ignoring sensible fears and clear-sighted warnings to re-align ourselves with how things are. As it says, 'the river of credit has dried up' - all the imagery is of liquidity and drought, heads buried in the sand warnings ignored (reminiscent of the warnings about terrorism increasing if we attack two sovereign nations that weren't a threat to us).
The regulators (Saturn) turned a blind eye (Neptune). Simple as that. And then the government told everyone that we are safe because the industry is regulated. This, of course, was a lie in every way. So there was a (arguably sensible) run on a bank, the first in the UK in 150 years. And we're still paying the price through taxation, government mismanagement, and a pervasive feeling of quiet - and sometimes not so quiet - panic.
In the astrology of health, Saturn-Neptune is connected with general widespread malaise, a sense that well-being has been lost in an ill-defined way that therefore can't be straight-forwardly corrected. The causes and cures are elusive, and the will to implement remedies is lacking, can't be mustered, or sustained. We're in that situation internationally.
Thankfully, the Saturn-Neptune series of oppositions is finished, but we're already entering a series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions. The Saturn-Uranus cycle is also likely to correlate with growing awareness of how screwed-up our financial systems are. There is a 'narrative' progression from Saturn-Neptune to Saturn-Uranus. Healthy regulation is key, because it is part of the wisdom of the Saturnian perspective. So is healthy government, and healthy institutions.
And the context is Pluto in Capricorn, which has been talked about for a long time in terms of the dangers of the powerful alliance between government and business. We're seeing the introduction to the first act of the play, but it's not too late to re-write the script; Pluto goes back into Sagittarius in June for a few months, before proceeding once again into Capricorn in November, for the next 16 years. In fact, it's imperative that we re-write this script without delay, and not leave it up to the government-business alliance to write it the way they want it.
The government-business alliance is not interested in changing the system, as the programme is pointing out. They just want to 'tweak' it. The lesson we should've learned from Saturn-Neptune is that the system itself is weak, vulnerable, and failure-riddled. It needs to be 'put to sleep', and something far more healthy be put in its place that brings in the other side of the Saturn-Neptune opposition: equality, fairness, organising society around socially responsible principles that take us towards real wealth, not the fake wealth we've been pretending to possess. Exploiting the 'have-nots' was always going to come to grief.
Here's C4's website on the programme:
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/dispatches/how+the+banks+bet+your+money/1563152
And here's a link to the main Saturn-Neptune article published in May 2006:
http://astrology21.co.uk/c1saturnneptune.html
And an article about the UK's Neptune transit from approx. 2003 to approx. 2008, which was published in 2005:
http://astrology21.co.uk/c1ukneptunevenus.html
This last article contains the following:-
In the UK's natal chart [view chart], Mars is almost opposite Neptune across the 8th-2nd axis, which are the houses of finances, banking, insurance, and so on. So this transit is a key transit to watch in terms of the UK economic structure, policies, and performance.
and more warnings about the security of banks and banking:
During the first phase of this transit there has been a major bank raid in Northern Ireland - one of the biggest ever in the UK's history. Another change has been the banking industry's introduction of the 'chip and pin' credit card system, ostensibly to cut down fraud.
and
there are now just a handful of large accountancy/auditing firms dominating the UK market, widely regarded as having blurred the boundaries between what were once separate functions of accounting and audition. Additionally, the accountants/auditors are now themselves international corporate players, doing business with similarly large clients, at the same time as working for government departments. UK accountants are the highest paid in the world, and in greater number than the rest of the European Union member states combined. In February 2002 the University of Essex's professor of accounting said:
"With 250,000 qualified accountants, Britain has more accountants than the rest of the EU put together, and one of the highest numbers of accountants per capita in the world. This unparalleled investment in economic surveillance has failed to deliver better corporate governance, company accounts, audits and freedom from frauds or scandals. Yet the ranks of accountants continue to swell."
Note the Neptunian references to fraud, scandals, and evasion of accountability. In 2005 and 2006 therefore, there is an opportunity to deal with these issues head-on. That opportunity may well present itself as an increase in rumours, scandals, leaks, or reviews of auditing procedures/laws, or in exposés of 'fuzzy boundaries' between corporations and governments, particularly as it's now very common for 'fat cat' directors to be recruited from the accountancy and finance industries.
In December 2003 a respected and prominent accountant named James Spooner resigned from the Institute of Chartered Accountants, he complained that its pronouncements were:
"opaque, occasionally, inane, and almost always designed to obfuscate rather than clarify in simple terms."
The former chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which is the ultimate regulator, said in July 2002:
"The difficulty is that it is a global issue and probably only the merger taskforce at the EU and the US Department of Justice can take this on effectively. I hope that in due course they do."
This transit of Neptune to the UK's Venus is 'crunch time' for the UK accountancy, auditing, governance, and company law issues, in this regard.
