If you were expecting some kind of sun sign nonsense, forget about it. This is real astrology for the real world. If it's real astrology for yourself that you want, you can get it by phone or in print. And if you need help deciphering the astrological glyphs in the graphics accompanying this article, see Astroglyphs: Astrological Symbols Guide. Please note: this forecast is expressed in terms of Universal Time (UT).

There's so much validation by headlines to the February forecast that I won't have time to detail it all. I have to start with what appears to be the big story for the month; namely the spasms in world equity markets and financial systems that seized the spotlight at the end of the month, within days of the Saturn-Neptune opposition. Regarding that alignment, I wrote that "the world financial system and the political order bound up with it both depend on confidence, and when confidence is shaken the whole edifice begins to crumble." (See the February forecast - and the 2007 World Forecast Highlights - for details.)

Confidence was indeed shaken as February drew to a close. Arguably, it started on the week of the 19th, which closed with three straight days of losing sessions on the closely-watched Dow and Standard and Poor's indices of US stocks. (Pundits attributed the drop to rising defaults in the subprime mortgage industry, but my forecast indicates the problem runs much deeper.) This was followed by the Chinese government's weekend announcement intended to put a damper on the irrational exuberance of the nation's stock markets set off a worldwide multi-percent single-day correction in major equity exchanges on Tuesday the 27th. Or was it prompted by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's announcement on the 26th that he foresaw the possibility of a US recession by year's end? Or perhaps it was the publication that same day of a survey of central bankers around the world, most of whom announced their decision to decrease their reliance on US dollar reserves in favor of gold, the euro, the yen, etc. It wasn't one single thing; and if my forecast is right, the passage of time will show that it wasn't one single correction, either.

As I wrote in my February forecast, "this won't be some huge dramatic and instantaneous cataclysm, but a series of settlings over a period of years that result in a new world order. The financial system is a key part of this, but political power is inextricably bound up in it as well. This month brings a few more of those shudders that settle the soufflé - not a bubble bursting in one catastrophic explosion, but a settling and shifting downward." The nub of the matter, as pointed out in my 2007 World Forecast Highlights, is that the world financial system is "a house of cards - and that's just the kind of structure that's critically vulnerable under the aegis of a Saturn-Neptune opposition coupled with a Jupiter-Uranus square." If you've been reading these forecasts for the last couple of years, you know what to expect, and what to do.