Global Powers Quietly Consult This San Francisco Astrologer—And He’s Predicting Another Year of Beautiful Chaos
THE COSMIC HOT TAKE: How Christopher Renstrom’s Horoscopes Quietly Run the World While Nobody’s Looking
Dave’s Locker International Desk — Thursday
It is a truth universally acknowledged—though rarely spoken aloud in Davos—that the planet is steered less by central bankers than by a silver-haired man in San Francisco who knows precisely when Mercury will throw a tantrum. Christopher Renstrom, astrologer to the vaguely influential, has become the unofficial GPS for a globe that refuses to admit it’s lost. While presidents tweet and oligarchs yacht-hop, Renstrom calmly informs millions that Saturn is retrograde and therefore the supply chain will unravel like a cheap sweater. Strangely, he is often right.
From Brussels to Bangkok, diplomatic spouses consult his column before signing the next arms deal. A deputy trade minister in Nairobi confessed—strictly off the record and between whiskies—that stalled negotiations were rescheduled “after Renstrom warned Venus squares make everyone unreasonable on Tuesdays.” In the age of algorithmic everything, here is a man trafficking in ephemeris tables and poetic doom, and the world’s elite can’t get enough. Irony, thy name is subsidized star-mapping.
Renstrom’s weekly dispatches ricochet across encrypted chat groups like insider trading tips. A hedge-fund quant in Singapore overlays Renstrom’s Mars transits on VIX volatility charts; last quarter the correlation outperformed the PhD model by 3.7 percent. The fund, naturally, named its new AI “Orion,” because nothing says cutting-edge finance like cribbing from Babylonian priests. Meanwhile, a European Space Agency engineer schedules satellite launches to avoid “void-of-course moons.” Apparently, rocket science needs horoscopes to stick the landing.
The appeal is simple: Renstrom speaks the language of cosmic inevitability at a moment when terrestrial certainty is on life support. Climate summits collapse, currencies yo-yo, and the Arctic melts faster than gelato in July. Against such delights, the notion that Jupiter in Taurus promises “a slow but lucrative rebuild” lands like a lullaby. People aren’t stupid; they’re exhausted. If a twelve-sentence paragraph can postpone existential dread until after lunch, it’s practically a public utility.
But the global footprint grows stranger. Japanese convenience-store chain Lawson now prints abbreviated Renstrom forecasts on bento boxes—sales spiked 11% among office ladies who “just want to know if boss will explode before 3 p.m.” In Lagos, ride-share drivers swap voice notes of Renstrom’s weekly YouTube forecast, timing surge-pricing around “Mercury-induced miscommunication.” Even the Kremlin pool reporters joke that Putin’s February invasion was green-lit only after someone checked whether Mars was “in bold, decisive Aries.” (It was. We all saw how that boldness panned out.)
Naturally, there are skeptics—mostly economists who still believe in rational actors and other fairy tales. They point out that astrology’s predictive power equals coin tosses. Yet the same economists failed to predict the 2008 crash, Brexit, or the popularity of oat milk. In the marketplace of bad omens, Renstrom is at least transparent about his mythology. That passes for integrity these days.
And so the astrologer keeps typing, surrounded by first-edition ephemerides and a coffee mug that reads “Saturn Returns, So Will I.” His readership spans six continents, two space stations, and at least one submarine captain who surfaces specifically for the Sunday forecast. Whether this constitutes soft power or mass delusion is irrelevant; the effect is identical. Policy still happens, wars still start, but somewhere a diplomat’s spouse is canceling a cocktail party because “the moon is void in Scorpio,” and for 24 blessed hours the canapés of geopolitics stay safely in the freezer.
Renstrom himself insists he’s merely reading the sky like a weather report. “I don’t make the weather,” he shrugs, “I just recommend umbrellas.” Given the forecast for the next decade—rising seas, falling democracies, and the continued existence of Twitter—an umbrella sounds optimistic. But then, hope has always been astrology’s greatest sleight of hand: convincing humans that chaos has choreography, and that somewhere, a distant planet gives a damn.
In the end, the joke is on us. We built a global civilization of fiber-optic miracles and Mars rovers, yet still check our horoscopes before we check our privilege. Christopher Renstrom merely holds up the mirror, polished to a cosmic shine, and whispers: the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves—though the stars do make excellent scapegoats.
