Kenneth Rogoff

Five of the ten planets are cardinal and only one is mutable. Water and earth take three each, with two apiece in fire and air. Venus, Mars and Jupiter spread across eighteen degrees of Taurus, and the chart holds a yod, which is an uncommon figure, made here of Mercury, Neptune and Pluto. The record is one line: Rogoff is an American economist and a chess grandmaster.

The Sun sits in quiet contact with Mars at one hundredth of a degree, which is about as near exact as a contact comes, and the reading is that effort comes easily and in a person's own interest: physical confidence, and somebody who does not need to be talked into starting. At a hundredth of a degree the orb is the remarkable part rather than the reading, which is a mild one, and saying so is more useful than making the orb carry a meaning it does not have.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at two thirds of a degree, and the reading is quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move. For a record that puts an economist and a chess grandmaster in the same sentence, an instinct for the unconventional move is the fit a reader will enjoy, and it is worth noticing that the phrase was written by somebody who was not thinking about chess at the time. Venus sits conjunct that same Mars at four tenths of a degree, wanting and pursuing being one thing, and the Sun sits in quiet contact with Venus at the same orb, so the Sun, Venus and Mars are bound together by three separate contacts all inside half a degree.

Mercury stands at an awkward angle to Neptune at under nine tenths of a degree, thinking that gets misty: confusion, being misunderstood or misunderstanding, and a tendency to believe the version of events that feels best. That is one leg of the yod, and in an economist it is the contact to be most suspicious of, because the reading is unflattering and the record gives nothing at all to test it with. The Moon sits on the sixth degree of Cancer at noon with Gemini still possible, so it is left out. Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the five retrograde planets, which is half the chart facing backwards. Jupiter came back to its Taurus birth degree on 10 April 2024, at seventy one, and five laps precede it. A Jupiter return opens a new twelve year chapter, and Taurus measures a thing by whether it lasted.