IMPORTANT: Do not buy or sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds, securities, precious metals, commodities, real estate, etc., based on astrological information in this article or any follow-up features. The cycles I am discussing are affecting nations, corporate structures, major organizations, and individuals. You have personal transits and progressions affecting your own birthchart, and should order a consultation to determine your investment plans for the future.

Updated July 12, 2012 but originally published: March 5, 2012 – After nearly 40 years as an astrologer and several decades of utilizing the tools of our trade to analyze the events that take place in the business and investment realm, I am sharing with you a few suggestions about how to educate yourself concerning the growing confusion about gold, silver and their future value in years ahead.

A Short History of How We Got Here… Relative to gold and silver – the two key precious metals that have stood behind the value of American money since our birth as a nation in 1776 – a key early event was the Coinage and Mint Act of April 2, 1792 that established the first U.S. Mint in Philadelphia whereby the ratio between gold and silver was recorded as 15 to 1 (or every 24.75 grains of gold being equivalent to 371.25 grains of silver). Over the decades that followed, the failure of two national banks, and one of the earliest U.S. depressions (1836 - 1837), our economic system was in complete disarray. Following closely after the discovery of Neptune in September 1846, one of the most important moments in our national life occurred in January 1848 when gold was discovered in Northern California. Not only did this lead to a massive movement and redistribution of our population from the East and Midwest to the West Coast, but it also brought a wave of immigrants to the shores of our future “Golden State” – leading to the nomenclature of the 49ers who came to California in the pivotal year of 1849 (when the planet of shocks and revolution – Uranus – made its first ever progressed station in America’s birthchart). Just one year later – in September 1850 – California entered the Union during a very rare Uranus-Pluto union in Aries. The Civil War created another crisis in our economic life – leading to Panics of 1873 and 1893, the historic Cross of Gold speech by William Jennings Bryan at the 1896 Democratic national convention, the Klondike Gold Rush (1896 – 1899), and the establishment of America on a gold standard by 1900. On December 23, 1913, the Federal Reserve Banking system went into effect – a system that is currently headed by Ben Bernanke (born December 13, 1953 with Sun in Sagittarius and Moon in Pisces), and which divides the nation into 12 banking sub-divisions. After the Stock Market Crash of October 24 & 29, 1929 and the start of The Great Depression (coinciding with the discovery of Pluto – the planet ruling the underworld in mythology – in February 1930), Franklin D. Roosevelt (a Sun-sign Aquarius born with Uranus rising) became President in a landslide and, just a month after his inauguration, he issued a shocking Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933 (making it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with the exception of some jewelry and collector’s coins).

Less than a year later – on January 30, 1934 – the Gold Reserve Act was signed into law (requiring that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve to be surrendered to the U.S. Treasury). Eventually, the gold went to the specially-designed vault at Fort Knox, Kentucky for safe-keeping, and this act also changed the price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35 – thereby deflating the value of paper dollars, but enhancing the wealth of the U.S. government in order to pass the sweeping legislation of the New Deal in the 1930s intended to end massive unemployment and get the nation moving again. It was finally on a Sunday evening in summertime – August 15, 1971 – when the number one western show Bonanza was normally airing on NBC – that President Richard Nixon (like FDR 38 years earlier, via an executive order not authorized by Congress) interrupted our evening entertainment to formerly take America off the gold standard, freezing wages and prices simultaneously for 90-days, following a difficult time-period of national inflation due primarily to the spiraling cost of our fighting the Vietnam War.

One Quarter of a 164-year Neptune Cycle Since 1971

While there are all kinds of ways to evaluate why gold and silver are rising and falling, we can also look at the U.S. birthchart (July 4, 1776) and major historical turning points (like the August 15, 1971 decision by President Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard, thereby setting up the last 40+ years of the price of an ounce of gold floating without an anchor). It turns out that when President Nixon made his declaration, transiting Neptune had just entered Sagittarius. Neptune has an orbit of 164 years and 41 years have now passed in 2012 – bringing the current transit of Neptune to the beginning of Pisces. Thus, Neptune is presently making a sharp square of 90-degrees to its previous location in 1971, and this challenging aspect – which just became exact three weeks ago – will repeat with near exactitude when Americans vote for a new president in November 2012. Thus, without realizing it and behind the scenes in this next electoral ritual for our nation, the leader who becomes the chief executive of America for the next 4-year cycle might have to grapple with one of the most extreme economic cycles we have ever faced. As the eminent astrologer Dane Rudhyar wrote in many of his books, the search for gold (especially in the 1848 – 1849 Gold Rush that drastically altered the shape of America) was a glamorized and dramatized search for God. After all, as every astrological student knows, the key planet of religion, spirituality and the longing for blissful union with the divine is Neptune. However, this is also the planet (when functioning in a negative manner) of deceptions, confusion, chaos, addictive behavior and, ultimately, fanaticism. It was only three to four years ago – when Saturn opposed Uranus five times (starting exactly on the day Barack Obama defeated John McCain for the presidency) – that Neptune also began coming back (after 164 years and for the first time) to its own discovery placement in late Aquarius from September 1846. I wrote many articles about what this meant and tried to warn clients, the astrological community and people around the world reading my astro-economic research that our political and financial leaders needed to redesign the global currency system because one of Neptune’s functions is to act as a higher octave to Venus (ruling personal money, banking and savings). While some G-7 meetings were held – oddly enough very close to two out of three Neptune Returns to its discovery place – once the third and final Neptune Return occurred in February 2010, those political and financial leaders failed to come up with anything tangible that might have prevented the various debacles that have been plaguing us during the last two years.

Seven Uranus-Pluto Squares are Coming Up from 2012 to 2015 Readers who have been following my reports should know that we are on the verge of a future cycle that may be equivalent to The Great Depression in terms of a similar series of conflicts between the planets of revolution (Uranus) and the underworld (Pluto). The first half of the 1930s saw these two celestial bodies form a waning square of 90-degrees – signifying enormous conflict between radical-change agent Uranus (i.e. The New Deal legislation transforming American life) and underworld-creating Pluto (representing the approximate 25% of the American workforce that was unemployed). Five times – from April 1932 to January 1934 – Uranus and Pluto were at loggerheads, bringing not only enormous upheavals to America, but the rise to power of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor and eventually dictator of Nazi Germany, with the ramifications that led to the start of World War II in September 1939. However, the soon-to-occur, Uranus-Pluto squares happening during what the media is saying is The Great Recession, will happen seven times and last longer than their mirror-reflection of the early 1930s. In addition, the Uranus-Pluto squares all of us will have to deal with – starting June 24, 2012 and ending March 16, 2015 – are waxing in nature (potentially more physical-emotionally exhausting than the ones from the 1930s). The waning square pattern of Uranus-Pluto in the 1930s pointed toward their eventual union that happened in 1965-1966 in Virgo three times. The waxing square pattern of Uranus-Pluto during much of the next three years signifies a crisis based on what occurred in the mid-1960s. And it was during the mid-1960s that America experienced the Free Speech Movement in its universities, the assassination of many of our idealistic leaders (JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK), the start of the highly-divisive Vietnam War, and the student-radical-youth revolt of 1968 which has its equivalence in the recent Occupy Movement that started last September in New York City. Not only will the seven Uranus-Pluto squares affect everyone politically and socially, but they will also influence the economy of America and the world. Three of the seven squares – the ones in 2014 and 2015 – will trigger America’s Sun placement in Cancer from the birth of our nation. Simultaneously, transiting Pluto in Capricorn will make five oppositions to America’s Sun – starting in March 2014 and continuing until Halloween 2015. These Pluto polarities to our country’s Sun (our character as a people, and our heart-center, core-power and life-force) have never happened before because Pluto has a 248-year orbit through the zodiac. Thus, what we are about to experience has no true historical parallel and – to add injury to insult – we are only 10 years away from our first Pluto Return to 28 degrees of Capricorn (our natal placement, which is located in the second house of money, banking, assets and values as a nation). Realize further that in 2008 – 2009, transiting Pluto united with the Federal Reserve Banking system Sun in Capricorn while simultaneously opposing its Pluto. I had warned several years earlier that our Federal Reserve Banking system was going to become either bankrupt or a tyrannical dictator (negative side of Pluto) due to its never-before confrontation with transiting Pluto. While the Federal Reserve Banking system has its fervent supporters, it has its highly vocal detractors (for example, Libertarian-Republican candidate and Congressman Ron Paul, who just last week chaired the House committee where Fed Chairman Bernanke appeared, and where Paul pointedly produced a silver dollar asking whether our currency would ever have any real and solid backing in the future). Plus – it was on that day when the price of gold very quickly plummeted over $75 an ounce (following Mr. Bernanke’s remarks), and no one still knows exactly why, although many have theorized this was connected to a huge sell-off by a super-wealthy power-broker who either had inside information and luckily guessed what the Fed Chairman would reveal in his congressional testimony that would rattle the precious-metal markets.

Recommendations for your Study

The foregoing has been offered not to scare you, but alert you to the need to figure out what you want to do to add safety and security to your economic future and the future of your children and grandchildren, friends and dear ones. Because of hidden and possibly manipulative forces within the mysterious power-elite and wealth-enclaves that are said to rule over the national and international financial markets, there are no easy answers concerning when and whether precious metals like gold and silver will rise a lot in value or not. Economic forecasters have been all over the place for years – often appearing as fools in the process.

A book I bought almost two years ago – entitled The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Debt Crisis of 2010 – 2012 by Harry S. Dent, Jr. – was a New York Times Bestseller, having over two dozen testimonials about his brilliance and previous prognostications in the beginning of this paperback volume. While some of his work was fascinating – with all kinds of astute research and statistics – he predicted that oil in our time-period might fall to a low of $15 for a barrel of crude oil (he is only off by nearly $100!), and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would have already fallen to around the 3,000 point level whereas it moved very much in the opposite direction. He has been partially correct about the temporary strength of the U.S. dollar, but not for the reasons he imagined. Furthermore, this was the same individual who had long ago predicted “Dow 36,000” and had to retract that in this book. Meanwhile, he is once again suggesting that we are in for a stock market crash and – while he could very well be right – he doesn’t seem to ever realize how corrupt and manipulative the Federal Reserve Banking system has become. and he certainly doesn’t understand the hidden depths of how astrological cycles influence everything and everyone.

My recommendations for your study at this time are straight forward. On the web, you should become familiar with http://www.jsmineset.com as well as http://www.rufftimes.com and http://www.kitco.com

The first in this list is the website for James Sinclair – a major figure in the gold market for many decades. I believe he may be connected to astrologers who give him information. He will often have guest columnists – who are also scholars about the price and value of gold – appear on his website. However, you should read Howard Ruff as well because he knows a lot about silver. Beyond both of those individual website, the third website on that list is terrific because you can read a wide variety of authors and economic researchers-forecasters daily, weekly and monthly. (You can arrange to have James Sinclair send you email updates for free. There are a couple of complimentary offerings on the Howard Ruff website, but his more thorough newsletter would be something to order by subscription. I have not subscribed to his newsletter, but in reading his columns frequently on www.kitco.com I have come to highly respect his common sense and logic – even though I don’t necessarily agree with his political views.)

There are a wide range of other websites – like http://www.bloomberg.com and http://www.marketwatch.com – which will give you a variety of economic viewpoints, helping you to understand the advantages and disadvantages of owning actual gold and silver (coins, bullion and bars) and how to store it – plus, the Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that are very common now as well as mining stocks and futures contracts. However, please remember that a full understanding of your own birthchart, transits and progressions, possibly relocation factors and natal midpoint structures will be crucial if you decide to become a trader or investor, and when and how often to do so. Some individuals are naturally lucky and fortunate on the financial-business front while others are not. Some people panic and grow fearful at strong, moderate or even slight movements up or down of a particular precious metal, commodity, currency, stock, bond, mutual fund or real-estate holding; other, more experienced people in the field may be steadier, more conservative, sensible and patient. You need to know who you are – as a business-savvy person – before you engage in financial-investment wheeling-and-dealing.

I would be remiss in closing this feature if I didn’t recommend the wonderful book Time & Money: The Astrology of Wealth by Barbara Koval (Paperback, 1993, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, Minnesota). This is a tour-de-force volume that can give anyone eager to understand fundamental economics – combined with the basics of astrology – dozens of hours of illumination and inspiration about the merger of these key realms of knowledge and wisdom.

Note: In the chart for the first of 7 Uranus-Neptune squares included below (as a thumbnail you can click on to enlarge), you will notice Neptune overhead at Washington, D.C. (adding a tone of great vision or massive confusion during this 2+ year cycle of Uranus-Neptune squares) -- plus, the red planet Mars in Virgo is square the horizon in late-Gemini and late-Sagittarius very closely (signifying financial losses, national volatility, warfare?) while the Sun placement at 3+ Cancer is exactly on our nation's Venus placement from July 4, 1776 (providing a slight nurturing presence or signifying that our overall banking system needs much more light and attention).

© 2012 by Mark Lerner and Great Bear Enterprises, Ltd. All rights reserved.