Nessus Rising: S & P Downgrades US Credit Rating

Note, this article was updated Saturday morning.

Friday night, Standard & Poor’s announced that it had downgraded the United States’ credit rating. This issue was going back and forth all day between the Department of Treasury and S & P. Treasury found a $2 trillion calculation error, which the rating agency admitted to, but still said it would be lowering the rating. Rachel Maddow just read S & P’s press release on the air, and it’s interesting — posted in the first comment below. S & P has a rotten reputation for endorsing things like junk bonds and the mortgage derivatives that were largely responsible for the recession, as well as for endorsing private debt over public debt.

S & P downgrades US credit rating. Time was stated by Rachel Maddow. It was announced at 8:27 pm on a CNN news blog and annunced at 8:30 pm by Keith Olbermann, live. I am using 8:20 pm. Note that as seems common these days, the ascendant and midheaven are both occupied by a centaur planet -- Nessus is rising, and Pholus is on the midheaven.

This is the first time that the United States has ever had its credit rating lowered. The result could be a rise in interest rates on a variety of financial products, a ripple effect through the markets, as well as certain states that are closely tied to the federal government having their credit ratings lowered. For a coherent political analysis, please see the comment by Astrodem, one of our frequent participants.]

The ratings agency, one of three private agencies that rates US the worthiness of US treasury bills, gave a diversity of political reasons for the downgrade, including the inability of Pres. Obama and Congress to work together, which is of course a premeditated situation on the part of certain political strategists. In any event, the statements by the ratings agency (which I have posted in the first comment below) seemed designed to get the attention of the political system. But it’s also an example of a private entity wagging the dog of government. And while they have a point, that point is not that the bond rating was lowered, but what led to it: the conduct of our political leaders.

As for the astrology: centaur planets factor prominently into this chart. Nessus (the third centaur) is rising, right in the region of 20 Aquarius — the midpoint of the Uranus-Pluto square (Gary and I covered this on last week’s special edition podcast). Nessus is a centaur planet, associated with consequences, cycles of karma and psychological and sexual abuse. Melanie Reinhart suggests that a key phrase for Nessus is, “The buck stops here,” appropriate enough in this situation.

Minor planets in the range of mid-mutable signs. This list only shows Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces.

Pholus is in the 10th house of this chart. Pholus is about out of control situations and runaway reactions. In the house of government, we have a picture of our feral wealthy elitists who are basically taking advantage of the end of the world by helping propagate it. Pholus is now conjunct several planets not shown — Narcissus (an asteroid), Ixion (out near Pluto, the lord of amorality), and Hylonome (the cry of the poor). These three points are conjunct the Great Attractor, a very powerful point far from our galaxy. [We are looking for other Planet Waves references to the Great Attractor now.] The upshot is that the Great Attractor is magnifying what certainly looks like a toxic brew of minor planets, mainly contaminated by narcissism.

In a sentence, we are indeed witnessing a bonfire of the vanities.

Meanwhile, in the ascendant, Nessus is suggesting that we are facing a moment of consequences, even if those consequences are driven by abusive intentions. Nessus is also aspecting Eris and the lunar nodes, making a slow-moving aspect structure that came into full expression during the shootings in Norway two weeks ago.

The Moon is in Scorpio, and its next aspect is to Jupiter — representing a kind of exaggeration effect. Note the position of Neptune, right in the last arc minute of Aquarius. We are in a throwback to the era of all smoke and all mirrors all the time — but now at least we’re smart enough to see what is what.

10 thoughts on “Nessus Rising: S & P Downgrades US Credit Rating”

  1. apparently a Chinese agency (Dagon) had downgraded the US credit rating on Tuesday(?)

    with China being the #1 creditor of the States, shouldn’t that perhaps be worthy of a chart?

    (i heard this talking with a guy who works at the local smoke shop a couple days ago – he said now that the Chinese have downgraded it, the US agencies are sure to follow)

  2. wow, 1473 was when Copernicus was born

    ok, so Nessus is currently in between Uranus and Neptune…

    so Nessus is telling us about the unfolding of the Uranus/Neptune conjunctions of the early 90’s (in Capricorn) and how this relates to the Uranus-Pluto squares

  3. Gary, in reply to your question, PW contributor Kirsti Melto (in Finland) says:

    Hi Eric,

    You are asking me this again? 🙂 Nessus crosses the orbits of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

    Perihelion distance is 11.850 AU, aphelion distance is 37.258 AU. Nessus comes close to Saturn but never crosses the orbit. Nessus sometimes crosses the orbit of Pluto, but this does not happen on every round around the Sun. The orbital period of Nessus is about 122 years, and the last time the orbital crossing of Nessus and Pluto happened was in 1473. I don’t know when the next time is going to be, because according to Riyal, at least before the year 2500, it is not going to happen again. The mean distance of Nessus is between Uranus and Neptune.

    Nessus was in perihelion on Jan 27, 1992 at 26+ degrees Libra. It will be in aphelion on Nov 10, 2052 at 22+ degrees Aries. Nessus was crossing Uranus on Feb 21, 2006. Nessus is going to cross Neptune on Oct 18 2021. These are heliocentric distance crossings.

    I hope this helps.

    xk

  4. Sad to say that I tend to agree with the previous statement

    History shows us quite clearly that each previous transit of Uranus thru Aries has resulted in events which led to a major conflict for our Nation as Uranus transited Gemini

  5. S&P’s downgrade happened as Neptune was retrograding back into Aquarius. You’ve said many times that Neptune in Aquarius is all about bullshit in the public space, and there is bullshit going on here, but not the kind that’s getting reported. Right now, everybody is asking about whether the credit rating downgrade, the math behind it, the reasoning behind it, and the agency behind it are full of shit. But that’s a diversion. And S&P doing this, in a typically Boomer-ific way (in other words narcissistic, polarizing, and belief-driven), makes the issue all about them — rather than what it’s really all about.

    S&P, in their reasoning, rightly calls attention to the GOP’s willingness to take the our country’s borrowing limit hostage and to threaten to default on our country’s obligations. Yes, Virginia, this is a problem. It’s true that governance by crisis and financial hostage-taking is an invitation to future catastrophe, but it misses the reason why. In order for the GOP to keep holding the debt ceiling hostage the way McConnell et. al. say they intend to, they’re going to have to keep telling their base that raising the ceiling is bad and that defaulting on our debt would be a reasonable thing to do. And that means over time, more and more Republicans are going to become convinced that 1) raising the debt ceiling is an absolute no-no and 2) that defaulting on our debt wouldn’t be actually be so bad.

    Our whole political system is asking whether S&P is full of shit, when what they really should be asking is why so many people in the GOP’s base are accepting the bullshit that their party leaders are feeding them. Because if we keep holding the debt ceiling hostage, eventually somebody’s going to shoot the hostage — even if it’s only by accident. All of Washington is up in arms tonight because S&P called them out. But what I’m saying is that the focus on S&P is a diversion. The focus should be on why the GOP base is so willing to accept such obvious and transparent lies from their leaders…and why the GOP’s leaders have embraced sociopathic behavior as an appropriate mode of governance. S&P made it all about them, and now we’ll never have this conversation. And in a way, that’s kind of the way our political leaders want it.

    Now, want to know something really scary? The debt deal supposedly pushed the next debt ceiling hike out to 2013. But it now looks like that was based on bad economic projections, that have just recently been revised downward. In other words, we could be having one of these default dramas all over again sometime next year, even if the economy does okay, to say nothing about what could happen if the economy takes a downturn as it appears to be doing now. Can you imagine trying to get a deal in the middle of the 2012 election? Or, say in June 2012, during the first Uranus-Pluto exact square?

    A very smart and very wealthy investor I recently spoke with described what happened earlier this week as the “Missouri Compromise” of our fiscal crisis. If he’s right, and let’s hope he isn’t, fiscal war is coming. That’s the story here.

  7. Hey Eric, yeah we should definitely keep an eye on that mid-point eh?

    Nessus is the one that links Saturn and Pluto, right? With Pluto in Capricorn, Saturn is the ruler of Pluto in the Sibly chart -AND byt transit…. we are currently having a Sibly Saturn return -and well on our way to our first Pluto return

    Also, this means Nessus crosses Uranus and Neptune in between…any idea where it is on its orbital trajectory at the moment? in other words, do you know the dates of Nessus’ perihelion and aphelion?

    gc

  10. This is from the S & P press release, located on the top right side of their homepage:

    Overview
    • We have lowered our long-term sovereign credit rating on the United States of America to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’ and affirmed the ‘A-1+’ short-term rating.
    • We have also removed both the short- and long-term ratings from CreditWatch negative.
    • The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.
    • More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.
    • Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics any time soon.
    • The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.

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