Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Gold, Post-Bubble

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Gold, post-bubble, is a reflection of just how bad things are, and it’s likely to get much worse

My long-held opinion is that gold does little aside from anchor a sound monetary view in a Keynesian debt world gone mad. For decades, as the Keynesian way (credit/debt leveraged for growth) has been THE way, it has come to be taken for granted by the masses.

Hence, the pervasively accepted notion of a centralized monetary authority that manipulates interest rates – thereby manipulating money – in service to micro-managing an economy that should be left to its own natural devices (a quaint and seemingly out of touch notion, I grant you).

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Gold Stocks & Gold/Silver Ratio

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Many gold bugs fail to understand the interplay between gold stocks and the Gold/Silver ratio

Misconception: noun; a view or opinion that is incorrect, based on faulty thinking or understanding

It has never failed. After the blessed 2001-2004 period the “misconceptions” game took over the precious metals as silver took leadership over gold (2004-2007), gold under-performed many commodities and “inflation trades” and the HUI/Gold ratio topped and declined for a long dirt nap, in which it is still snoozing.

That was damage done to the gold mining sector’s internals (even as it continued to rise nominally) by a pervasive inflated macro that was working to the benefit, however moderately, of economies. The HUI/Gold ratio (HGR) declined as it should have.

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Gold Mining Macrocosm Fully Engaged

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As Inflation Bugs sell indiscriminately, the gold mining Macrocosm (of proper macro-fundamentals) is engaged

A man sits in the White house. A different kind of man. A man who does not like diplomacy or going along and getting along with his global counterparts. He likes throwing Spanners and Monkey Wrenches all around the macro. There may one day be revealed a positive outcome to this, through negotiations. But on the face of it, nobody wins a tariff war. Least of all the biggest consumerist nation on the planet.

Clicking the graphic will yield the reason that the veteran trader pictured with a pensive, almost resigned look on his face with a sea of red behind him, looks the way he does (they always seem to find just the right guy with just the right expression for the moment). The reason du jour this morning is China retaliation.

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Does Trump Realize What America Is?

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Trump appears to be using a 1970s, or worse, 1930s playbook; and those playbooks did not work even though the US had a large industrial base at those times

Note: I started writing on similar themes to this back in 2004, with FrankenMarket Lives.

Progress

Donald Trump appears to have some sort of fantasy about what America is. I share his pride in this country as it was in the WWII era and maybe beyond, into the 1970s. I am, shall we say mature of age as well. Not nearly Trump’s age, but old enough to remember the inflationary angst of the 1970s and interested enough in economics to know about the post-bubble Great Depression of the 1930s.

I write now as a former manufacturing person. As the threat of Japan’s industrial rise grew steadily in the 1980s, we had to abandon the old ways of doing things, like men cranking handles in a profession (precision machining) that was more craft than labor. In short, in this new globally competitive reality it was “automate or die”. We automated. That was progress. America’s industrial base, following the likes of Japan, progressed even as its gross industrial base contracted under global pressure and yes, the productivity of automation.

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