I apologize for my absence. Grief and graduate school kind of shifted my priorities for a while. I think it’s important to give grief whatever attention it needs. It’s when we push it down and pretend that everything is fine that it morphs into something more unmanageable later on.

The astrology of July isn’t likely to sound an alarm bell, but it will be the beginning of some ongoing dramatic shifts. Uranus in Gemini after 7 years in Taurus will pick up momentum right as we experience our nation’s 250th birthday. Mars will align with Uranus at 3-4 degrees of Gemini, squaring the lunar nodes at 0 degrees Pisces/Virgo.

The U.S. Sibley chart is our national birth chart from 1776. I’ll add it below to use as a reference with July transits on the bi-wheel.

You can see in the 6th house that Mars and Uranus in Gemini will be moving towards a conjunction with natal Uranus at 8 degrees. As a young nation, it’s striking how every Uranus Return (which happens every 84 years) lands us in some sort of major conflict. The last time was WWII; the one before that was The Civil War, and naturally the one before that was The Revolutionary War which happened simultaneously with our inception. It’s like a timer that goes off when Uranus completes its orbit around the Sun.

If you look at the 2nd house, another transit that pops out is Pluto at 4 degrees Aquarius – just 2 degrees away from the south node at 6 degrees Aquarius. That adds a layer of intensity that hasn’t happened yet during a U.S. Uranus Return – though the conjunction won’t happen until late February 2027.

The outer planets aligning with the lunar nodes by hard aspect (conjunction, square or opposition) is historically not subtle. Since we are dealing with the 2nd house of resources and the 6th house of daily life, work and routine, the energy/supply chain crisis will start to spiral out of control in ways we can’t ignore.

We are already at war with Iran, which is escalating but hasn’t felt dramatic quite yet. Sometimes, tensions begin so gradually that no one notices until one day they feel extreme. The war of attrition is poised to whittle away the U.S. economy simply by how exorbitantly the U.S. military responds to threats.

In the May 2026 inflation report, energy costs accounted for over 60% of increases in the consumer market. Not subtle. Gas prices went up 7% in May. Electricity has gone up close to 6% in the past year.

The AI tech bubble hasn’t burst yet and plays a key role in energy prices surging. It takes a lot of energy to run AI. ChatGPT and OpenAI have reached an annual revenue of $25 billion, but that’s hardly net profit. They are looking at projected losses due to energy costs of around $14 billion. Their partner debt taken on by suppliers like Oracle to build AI data centers clocks in around $96 billion. For those of us who lived through the DotCom boom of the early aughts, there is a similarly foolish optimism that doesn’t quite see the forest for the trees.

Thankfully, interest rates weren’t lowered in May because that would make a potential crash even worse later on. Inflation right now is affected primarily by rising energy costs.

If you read my earlier post “The Fall of the Dollar’, I mentioned how sanctions are what encouraged nations like Russia and China to form alliances with oil rich nations and deliberately trade in Rubles or Yuan. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Putin all chose to forsake the dollar to stand up to U.S. bullying. Iran was doing the same thing. As the 3rd most oil rich nation of the world, the U.S. doesn’t get to skim the fat if Iran chooses to trade in Yuan instead of dollars. That’s one of the reasons for the conflict – it’s not just about Israel.

Nations can’t de-dollarize reactively, as that would take down the global economy catastrophically. You have to wean yourself from the tit. Brazil started shifting its central bank reserves away from U.S. dollars into gold in 2024-2025. Like I mentioned before – things happen gradually but it isn’t just chance. There is a careful strategy involved. While history has tended to repeat itself, we have to give governments and financial institutions a little credit for attempting to avoid disaster.

The sovereign debt crisis, however, is an economic inevitability. When a country is unable or unwilling to pay back its national debt, a default on that debt is unavoidable, which wipes out pension funds and overall confidence. The U.S. hasn’t experienced this yet because of its plan with Bretton Woods after WWII. Between 1945-2026, a lot has happened.

When the government issues massive amounts of new Treasury bonds to help pay back the deficit, in order to make that debt appealing to foreign investors, they have to raise interest rates. Like, for example, if China purchases 10% of U.S. debt in bonds, the highest interest rate possible would make that deal way more attractive. China would get billions back in interest. That’s the only reason why Russia and China were the biggest holders of U.S. Treasury bonds for decades.

But because of sanctions, taking Russia off of SWIFT, general bullying and trying to keep interest rates reasonable for consumers and investors, the U.S. bonds market has been steadily declining. In other words, more and more U.S. debt is just sitting there – all dressed up with nowhere to go.

If the U.S. debt hits 210% of GDP, it is game over. Thankfully, we’re nowhere near there yet. It’s only about 101%. Under manageable conditions, it won’t reach 210% for another 20 years. However, the bonds market is not showing any signs of improvement – and it could get a lot worse. If a loss of confidence forces the Federal Reserve to hold interest rates even 1 percentage point higher than they are now, that could cost an extra $3-4 trillion in interest costs. With geopolitical concerns affecting confidence as well, the melting point could happen by 2035.

The major caveat: if the war of attrition continues with Iran or war in general escalates, that increases defense spending from $900 billion to a possible $2 trillion per year in new debt. Which brings collapse to a much closer projection of 5-7 years. 2032 seems reasonable.

Pluto on the south node in early 2027 could bring this kind of shock. The reality is – the U.S. cannot escape this. It is a question now of how soon it will happen. An economic collapse will certainly affect us just as dramatically as WWII, but this time, there will be no Bretton Woods II to try to step in and save the day. That ship has sailed.

With China taking the economic reigns as superpower by 2032, how will that affect the rest of the world? A more sustainable, multi-polar world is possible, but we can’t really know yet what it will look like.