"Millionaires don't use astrology, billionaires do." or do they? Astrology and Money: From J.P. Morgan to the Reagans
From J.P. Morgan's astrologer to the colour-coded calendars of the Reagan White House, the entanglement of money and prophecy is older and stranger than its folklore allows. Here is a clear-eyed look at the financiers and presidents who consulted the stars, and what they were actually paying for.
There is a line that surfaces whenever wealth and astrology are mentioned in the same breath. "Millionaires don't use astrology, billionaires do." It is attributed to J. Pierpont Morgan and repeated with the confidence of scripture. The trouble is that nobody can find where Morgan said it. The astrologer and biographer Karen Christino went looking for the source and traced the earliest printed version to the newspaper columnist Sydney Omarr in 1989, more than seventy years after Morgan was in his grave. [1] The quote is a fossil with no animal inside it, which is a useful thing to remember before we go any further, because almost every story in this territory turns out to be softer at the edges than its retelling suggests.
Morgan did know an astrologer, and her name was Evangeline Adams. She ran a consulting practice out of an office in Carnegie Hall and counted among her clientele a roster that read like a guest list for the Gilded Age: the financier Charles Schwab, two presidents of the New York Stock Exchange, the tenor Enrico Caruso, the actress Tallulah Bankhead. [2] Carrie Tirado Bramen, an English professor at the University at Buffalo who has studied Adams for the Journal of Cultural Economy, makes the case that astrology was never quite the fringe practice we imagine it to have been. It sat inside the culture of speculative capitalism, offering investors something the new science of economic forecasting was also beginning to sell them, which was a narrative about the future. [2]
How much Morgan actually leaned on Adams is harder to pin down than the legend allows. Ron Chernow, in his history of the Morgan dynasty, writes that Morgan took readings from Adams on everything from politics to the market, but he supplies no source for the claim. [3] When the historian Walter Friedman put the question to the Morgan Library, the archive acknowledged no correspondence between the two and no entries in any of Morgan's datebooks. What it could point to was the zodiac worked into the ceiling of the library Morgan built, a man's taste in interior decoration standing in for evidence of his portfolio strategy. [3] The most vivid testimony comes from Adams herself, who wrote in her 1926 memoir The Bowl of Heaven that she had taught Morgan astrology and supplied him a regular service in his final years. A memoir written by the interested party is not the same as proof, and Adams had a long career of presenting herself as more central to events than the record supports.
She was, even so, a remarkable operator. Arrested three times in New York for fortune telling, she beat every charge. Her 1914 acquittal became famous when she read the chart of an anonymous subject who turned out to be the presiding judge's son, and the judge declared that she had raised astrology "to the dignity of an exact science." [4] It was excellent theatre and excellent marketing. The reality of her forecasting was less impressive. Thousands of subscribers to her newsletter were advised to buy into the market during the long climb toward 1929, and her most quoted prediction, made weeks before the crash, was that stocks "might climb to heaven." [4] The investor and writer Kenneth Fisher, looking back, called her an obvious quack with no real investment knowledge, and noted the pattern that recurs through this entire history: the few hits get publicised while the misses are forgotten by people who wanted to believe in the first place. [4]
If Adams was the society astrologer, the figure who tried to turn the heavens into an actual trading system was W.D. Gann. A cotton broker turned market theorist, Gann built a reputation in the early twentieth century on the idea that markets moved not at random but according to laws of time and geometry, and his charts were threaded with planetary symbols and astrological angles. [5] His admirers still treat him as a kind of financial Nostradamus. The skeptics have the more interesting evidence. Alexander Elder, who interviewed Gann's son, reported that the great man could not support his family by trading and earned his living selling instructional courses, and that his estate came to a little over a hundred thousand dollars when he died in the 1950s. [5] Gann made his money teaching people how to make money, which is a tell that recurs across the whole field. The tradition he founded carried on regardless, through writers such as Louise McWhirter, who in the 1930s tied the business cycle to the lunar nodes, and the newsletter analyst Arch Crawford, who blended technical and astrological signals and made some celebrated calls in the 1980s. [6]
The deeper objection to all of it is not moral but mechanical. The efficient market hypothesis holds that any genuinely reliable pattern, including a planetary one, would be spotted, arbitraged, and erased the moment it became known. The persistence of these alleged cycles is, to an economist, the strongest possible evidence that they do not work, because a working edge does not survive contact with a market full of people hunting for edges. [7] What financial astrology offers instead is something the data cannot supply, which is a structure to lean on when the screen is a wall of noise and a decision has to be made anyway.
This is the point at which the two grand names usually invoked in this conversation, Rockefeller and Kennedy, need a degree of honesty that the folklore rarely provides. The Rockefeller connection, on inspection, more or less evaporates. Search for it and you find astrologers casting John D. Rockefeller's birth chart after the fact, which anyone can do for any public figure, rather than any record of the man consulting one. [8] Rockefeller was a strict evangelical Baptist who attributed his fortune to providence and a ledger-keeper's discipline, an improbable customer for a horoscope. The "billionaires use astrology" line is sometimes pinned on him too, which tells you it functions as a piece of free-floating mythology that attaches itself to whichever titan the teller has in mind.
Kennedy is a subtler case, because the association is real but it runs the opposite way to the premise. JFK did not read his stars to govern. He became the subject of the most famous astrological prediction of the century, made by the Washington psychic Jeane Dixon. In a Parade magazine profile from May 1956, Dixon was reported to think the 1960 election would be won by a Democrat who would then be assassinated or die in office, though "not necessarily in his first term." [9] After Dallas, that sentence made her career. What gets left out of the retelling is that Dixon hedged it heavily, later admitted she had seen Nixon as the 1960 winner, and at one point in 1960 predicted outright that Kennedy would fail to win the presidency. [10] The mathematician John Allen Paulos coined a name for the mechanism that built her fame, the Jeane Dixon effect, meaning the habit of broadcasting a forecaster's rare hits while quietly burying the far larger pile of misses. Dixon predicted the Soviets would reach the moon first, that World War Three would begin in 1958, and that a cure for cancer would arrive in 1967. [10] She was a marvel of survivorship bias wearing the costume of prophecy.
For the one episode where astrology demonstrably shaped decisions at the summit of power, you have to leave the financiers and the myths and go to the Reagan White House. The story broke in 1988 when Donald Regan, the former chief of staff, published his memoir and called it the most closely guarded domestic secret of the administration. Virtually every major move the Reagans made, he wrote, "was cleared in advance" with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to confirm the planets were favourable. [11] The woman was Joan Quigley, a Vassar-educated astrologer from a moneyed Nob Hill family. Nancy Reagan had turned to her in earnest after the 1981 assassination attempt, gripped by a fear that her husband might be shot again at any public appearance, and the two spoke by phone almost daily for seven years. [11][12]
What Quigley controlled was not policy but timing, and in a presidency the timing is close to everything. She produced colour-coded calendars, green for safe days, red for dangerous ones, that governed when Air Force One could take off and land, when the president could debate, when he could travel. [13] When the second inauguration fell on an astrologically poor day, the swearing-in was timed to 11:56 and fifty seconds at night to thread a favourable window. [13] Quigley later claimed she had briefed the president through Nancy for every meeting with Gorbachev at Geneva, and had pressed the Reagans to drop the "evil empire" posture because Gorbachev's chart, to her eye, marked him as a real reformer. [12] The Reagans, predictably, played it down once it was public. Ronald insisted no decision had ever turned on the stars. Nancy, in her own memoir the following year, framed it as a coping mechanism rather than a creed, one of the ways she handled the terror of nearly losing her husband. [12] Both things can be true. The fear was real, and the astrologer was, for several years, holding a pen over the most powerful schedule on earth.
So what was anyone buying? The scientific verdict on astrology's core claim is not kind, though it is more contested than the headline suggests. The reference point is Shawn Carlson's double-blind study, published in Nature in 1985, which had astrologers attempt to match natal charts to personality profiles and concluded they performed no better than chance. [14] That result hardened into received wisdom. It is worth knowing that the study has since been picked apart, including by the German psychologist Suitbert Ertel, who reanalysed the data and argued that, treated as a whole, the astrologers' matches reached marginal statistical significance after all. [14] The reanalysis comes mostly from researchers sympathetic to astrology, and a separate replication by McGrew and McFall, in which six expert astrologers tried to match charts to detailed case files, found nothing. The honest summary is that astrology has never produced a robust, repeatable predictive result under controlled conditions, while the studies that claim otherwise remain disputed at the margins.
The more durable explanation for why intelligent and powerful people keep reaching for it lives in psychology rather than astrophysics. In 1949 the psychologist Bertram Forer gave his students what they believed were personalised readings and watched them rate the descriptions as uncannily accurate, when in fact every student had received the same vague paragraph lifted from a newsstand astrology column. The Forer effect, also called the Barnum effect, explains a great deal of the felt accuracy of a horoscope, which is built from statements general enough to fit almost anyone yet specific enough to feel personal. Layer onto that the human appetite for pattern in noise, and the particular pressure of having to act under deep uncertainty with real money or real lives at stake, and the appeal becomes legible. A chart does not have to be true to be useful. It can reduce the paralysis of too many variables, impose a discipline of timing, and give a frightened person a structure to hold while they commit to a decision they were going to have to make in the dark regardless.
That, in the end, is the thread running from Adams's Carnegie Hall office to Quigley's red and green calendars. The very wealthy have always been able to buy almost any form of certainty except the real thing, and prophecy is the oldest luxury product of all, sold to people who have run out of more conventional ways to feel in control. The markets did not bend to Morgan's astrologer, Rockefeller almost certainly never had one, and Kennedy's stars predicted nothing he could have used. What endures is the want itself. We are pattern-finding creatures with money to lose and futures we cannot see, and the sky has been obliging us with shapes for as long as we have been looking up at it and hoping someone, somewhere, already knows how the story ends.
References
Karen Christino, "J.P. Morgan and Astrology," karenchristino.com. Traces the apocryphal "billionaires use astrology" line to Sydney Omarr (1989) and to Adams's own The Bowl of Heaven (1926).
University at Buffalo, "UB researcher explores astrological speculation and capitalism in Gilded Age America" (2026), on the work of Carrie Tirado Bramen in the Journal of Cultural Economy; Adams's clientele including Morgan, Charles Schwab and two NYSE presidents.
Walter Friedman, Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters (Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 217 n.1, on the Morgan Library acknowledging no correspondence and pointing to the library's zodiacal design; Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (Grove/Atlantic, 1990), p. 51, asserting the Morgan–Adams relationship without citation. Both discussed in B. Levine, "Evangeline Adams, Astrology, and the Professions" (Yale, 2014).
"Evangeline Adams," Wikipedia, citing Carol Krismann and investment analyst Kenneth Fisher ("obvious quack"); the 1914 acquittal and Judge Freschi's "dignity of an exact science"; the pre-crash "stocks might climb to heaven" forecast and newsletter advice to buy before 1929.
"William Delbert Gann," Wikipedia; Alexander Elder, Trading for a Living (1993), on Gann's son's account, the income from selling courses, and the c. $100,000 estate.
"Financial Astrology: A Joke or a Psychological Trading Tool?," hw.online, on Louise McWhirter (1930s, lunar nodes and the business cycle) and Arch Crawford.
On the efficient market hypothesis objection to financial astrology, see B. Shah, "Financial Astrology: Fact, Fiction, or the Market's Forgotten Forecasting Tool?," Bramesh's Technical Analysis (2025).
AstroDatabank (astro.com) and similar sites hold only retroactively cast charts of John D. Rockefeller; no primary record of Rockefeller consulting an astrologer exists. Biographical detail from Ron Chernow, Titan (1998).
"Incredible Crystal Gazer," Parade, 13 May 1956, quoted in P. Collins, "The last JFK assassination myth," Salon (2015).
"Jeane Dixon," Wikipedia; The Skeptic's Dictionary, "Jeane Dixon and the Jeane Dixon effect," on her contradictory 1960 forecasts and John Allen Paulos's coinage; New World Encyclopedia, "Jeane Dixon."
Donald Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988); "Good Heavens! An astrologer dictating the President's schedule?," Time, 16 May 1988; Hoover Institution, "Hoover Makes Available the Newly Processed Papers of Nancy Reagan's White House Astrologer."
Nancy Reagan, My Turn (Random House, 1989); Joan Quigley, What Does Joan Say? My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan (Birch Lane Press, 1990); "Astrologer who helped guide President Reagan's schedule dies at 87," PBS NewsHour (2014).
Encyclopedia.com, "Joan Quigley"; A. McDuffee, "Ronald Reagan actually used this San Francisco astrologist to make presidential decisions," Timeline / Medium (2017), on the colour-coded calendars and the 11:56:50 inauguration timing.
Shawn Carlson, "A Double-Blind Test of Astrology," Nature 318 (1985): 419–425; S. Ertel, "Appraisal of Shawn Carlson's Renowned Astrology Tests" (2009), reanalysis claiming marginal support; J. McGrew and R. McFall replication finding no effect. On the underlying psychology, Bertram Forer, "The Fallacy of Personal Validation" (1949), the basis of the Forer/Barnum effect.