Jupiter In Aquarius — The End Of Money — The Currency Of Light

Tap into the current. . .

It’s time to bury your 19th century notion of money right now–if you don’t you may not survive what’s on the horizon. The current economic maelstrom is self-assembling, almost at the speed of light. We’re talking zeros and ones, abstractions of value that you and I must have to strive to comprehend in order to level the playing field so that we may not only survive, but prosper beyond out wildest dreams in the weeks, months and years to come. With Jupiter in Aquarius, especially as it moves closer and closer towards Neptune in Aquarius, we are rapidly approaching a “currency of light.” In order to understand this concept, it’s critical that we travel backwards in time, back to 1997 when the floodgates of cash opened wide to fuel the dot.com bubble and beyond.

The Silicon Rush And Bubble No. 1

A few weeks back, I was reading a post over at Catherine Austin Fitts‘ site and she was detailing the evolution of the current economic crisis and when it really began in earnest. Based on her research and findings, she found that huge sums of money were transferred out of The US in 1997. We’re talking trillions, much of it headed towards China. As a result of the lack of available assets tethered to the US economy, The Clinton Administration in conjunction with The Fed initiated the bubble cycle starting with the dot.com boom. The Fed lowered interest rates on money so that venture capitalists could access cheap money and fund a flurry of start-ups, some of which were viable business models, others just a pipe dream hatched in dorm rooms that looked sexy to investors (hello MP3,com). But the real money wasn’t being made by the VC’s or the start-ups themselves, many of whom were doomed from day one, but it was the brokerage firms and banking houses like, Shearson Lehman, Goldman Sachs, etc, who set up the IPO’s for all of the sundry start-ups. They did all the legal work, filed papers with The SEC, set up the links between NASADQ and the company they made public, framed the stockholders agreements, etc. For all of their work, they were paid cash fees as well as stock in each start up, at founders levels, so for instance, they were getting pre-IPO shares at pennies on the share and when the stock went public, they were not constrained by any rules regarding sale of the the stock. Unlike most employees who had to wait over a year to begin to vest a portion of their options, the brokerage firms could sell as soon as a stock went public and if you can reach back that far, there were stocks opening upwards of $100 share. Now imagine having 25,000 shares at pennies a share. Just do the math. And there were literally hundreds of start-ups in the valley and just a few brokerage firms bringing them public. This signaled the first massive transference of wealth. As I mentioned before, most of the start-ups were doomed from day one. Here’s why.

The Death Of The Start-Ups

While the brokerage houses made fast cash, getting in early and getting out quick with little restraints on their economic responsibilities, the dot,coms were under a totally different set of rules and parameters. Most dot.coms were under strict orders to spend their seed money, often in the first year or lose it. This stringent rule was antithetical to the basic rules of running a business, especially businesses that needed time and capital to flourish in a very young marketplace, ie e-commerce. Most business models were half-baked and rushed to market in order to get funding, some were ahead of their times, others were not allowed to develop due to market restraints and restrictions, such as the digital music business, which was my background and others were just for lack of a better term, a masturbatory exercise in buying $500 chairs, flat screen TV’s and fully catered lunches. Businesses like that, in a young market would need capital to get them through the challenging and steep part of their developmental curve to get to profitability, and yet they were given very clear mandates to spend the cash. Those types of conditions were not conducive to growing a business, but they were very favorable for doing other things, which we will look at very shortly.

While The Valley was gorging on cash, micro-brew Friday beer bashes, launch parties fueled by DJ’s getting obscene amounts to spin records and launching some good and some not so very good ideas into the marketplace, people were enticed to drop lots of dollars into the doomed start-ups. Fluffed up by the prospect of getting obscene returns on their investments, investors, newer money investors who couldn’t afford to get in on a blue chip stock saw visions of El Dorado all over NASDAQ. But when millions crammed into the building, Alan Greenspan cut off the flow of cheap money as interest rates rose week after week. This effectively killed secondary and third rounds of funding that businesses needed in order to survive and get to the next level. Once the building was packed, it was set on fire. In April of 2000, the bottom dropped out of the market and the fall was far deeper than most people realize. In fact, the crash of 2000 was even worse than the crash of 28. The only thing that softened the blow was the next bubble . . . the housing bubble. If the housing bubble didn’t come along, the dot.com crash could have been close to what we’re experiencing today.

Who Benefitted?

We have already ascertained that the brokerage houses made out like fat cats. Some CEO’s did fairly well if they managed to rig their founder shares (can you say backlisting?) amidst their steroidal IPO’s. But for the most part, it was an illusory entre into some fantasy world of six-figure salaries and corporate cards for most dot.commers. Investors certainly didn’t benefit. But what took place during that time was that early adopters paved the way for others success, usually companies that were more established. For instance, when I was at emusic, we made a number of overtures to Apple to co-market, partner, etc. Apple was very polite, held meetings, exchanged info and ideas, but never committed to much of a working relationship. Well, in 2002, we found out why, when iTunes debuted and literally changed the landscape of digital distribution over night. They benefitted from witnessing the glorious flop of Napster and watching emusic struggle with trying to sell subscriptions with mostly unheard of artists to people looking for Brittany Spears. They saw what worked and didn’t work and rolled out the iTunes. Other companies, more established companies bought struggling companies with a good idea but dwindling cash for pennies on the dollar. They profited from the crash immensely. But what really took place during that time was that the infrastructure to move cash back and forth, zeros and ones, digits at the speed of light was built. The fiber-optic pipeline was laid down and more importantly the connections, the links, the electronic handshakes, the routing, the re-routing and the plumbing was put in place for the biggest and most devastating bubble that was about to pop.

The Derivative Doom Bubble

Once the internet was developed and fleshed out in the late-nineties/early oughts and the banks and mortgage brokers got on line, then it was just a matter of time before they could start selling digital paper, the interest on paper and the futures of paper, the complete and total abstraction of debt based on bad loans that were destined to go in the toilet. These billions of mortgages and loans were traded and sold, all based on speculation and it was the internet that moved those transactions along and it was simply a series of zeros and ones moving from one electronic folder to another. There was no collateral, no hard based assets to back up those zeros and ones literally racing through the air around us. How’s that for an abstraction? Think about this. Right now, as you are reading this, massive amounts of zeros and ones, the wealth of nations are literally passing through your skin or through the very wires that connect you to the reading of this website. And when you take into account this story of a $5 billion just vanishing out of thin air, which started a run on the banks, it couldn’t have taken place without without the internet, the hook ups and the digital hand shakes. Day trading, shorting stocks on airlines before they crash into towers just days before they do, all aided and abetted by the development of the internet and e-commerce which took place on the piggy back of the dot.com boom. If you cannot understand the enormity of the fact that money no longer truly exists, that it is simply agreed upon transference of zeros and ones and the abstract compact that zeros and ones are representative of debt, a debt that has a due date, then you will be left in the dust of what’s to come. The quaint notions of dollars and fiat currency are simply that. The next step of course is digital currency and a digital chip based economy. But that is not our only alternative.

The Currency Of Light

If we can agree upon two notions that are principally true, that “what is above, so is below” and that “every action has an equal but opposite reaction” then what we are witnessing with the abstraction of money and it’s exchange on a digital level, is also representative of something else; some other energy exchange based on the transference of energy, creativity, knowledge and more than anything else, spiritual value. What if we were already linked up in an organic, neural network of alive connectivity, each one of us carbon based receptor sites of the global brain? What if the internet and digital transactions are an echo reflection from the virtual space of our collective mind and simply another manifestation of other types subtle networking? If that is the case, then we have the ability and opportunity to exchange ideas, inspiration, novelty and complexity on highly abstract levels. Let’s say for instance, a number of people are interested in creating a new form of technology, or exploring some new mode of consciousness, or craft a solution to a complex problem, we have the ability to link up and inspire one another in ways that we are not wholly aware of.

In the quantum universe, the rules that govern our reality are a lot more fluid than we can understand and “The Currency Of Light” occurs at the quantum level. The currency of light is fueled by passion and possibility, a sense of expectancy and an affirmative stance that we are greater than our current capacities have revealed themselves to us. The challenge in connecting with the currency of light is to not unplug from the current model, but to create something entirely new–not in opposition–but as an organic solution to a whatever milieu we inhabit which offers us creative challenges. We begin to traffic in the currency of light by noticing and drawing our awareness deeper and deeper into the vast spaces of consciousness, of limitless love and possibility. In this new realm of awareness, the rules of time and space begin to fade away and we can participate with the future in ways that we are not aware of. In the realms of synchronicity, premonition, pre-cogntion, clues and messages arise like a momentary sphinx in our awareness, waiting for us to determine the contours of it’s meaning.

With Jupiter in Aquarius, we have the opportunity to re-imagine what abundance is for us, since Jupiter represents the power of abundant choices, abundant alternatives, abundant lifestyles, and Aquarius represents new ideas, innovation, breathtaking breakthroughs and radical leaps of consciousness. It’s up to us where we want to put our awareness and how we choose to link up with others that are also deeply engaged in such a pursuit. The time is now, because it may be more difficult when the intensity of the economic abstractions of this world do their very best to impose their realness upon us and we might have to make a very determined choice in which direction we consciously opt in on.

Do it now, while the space isn’t as constrained as it will be in the days, weeks and months ahead. Dare to imagine the world that you want to inhabit, open your aperture as wide as you can right now and start to invest in “the currency of light.”