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.

‘Show Grit Like Bernanke’

By -

So Janet Yellen is giving the old Knute Rockne routine to the graduates at NYU.

Yellen tells graduates: Show grit like Bernanke

“We’re going inside ’em… we’re going outside ’em… and when we get ’em on the run once, we’re gonna keep ’em on the run!” –Knute Rockney

“My predecessor at the Fed, Chairman Ben Bernanke, demonstrated such courage, especially in his response to the threat of the financial crisis. To stabilize the financial system and restore economic growth, he took courageous actions that were unprecedented in ambition and scope.”

It takes a lot of courage to double down on the same stuff that created the financial crisis to begin with. Putting out fire with gasoline… yes, that takes courage. (more…)

ZIRP Era in Pictures

By -

Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) was instigated by a credit induced collapse of the US financial system and perpetuated in December of 2008 by desperate financial policy makers as a fix to problems they created in the first place.

In reality, it is simply an epic distortion of normal economic signals that cleaned up the mess created by previous policy distortions (like the commercial credit bubble of the Greenspan era) by systematically (5+ years and running) main lining new distortions into the system.

zirp (more…)

Pigs No Longer Fly; What Are the Implications?

By -

Along with the highly publicized loss of leadership from big tech, the US stock market is now in danger of losing another, and possibly more important leader, the piggies or banking sector.

While the weekly chart of BKX has not yet broken down, it is very close to doing so after sporting a negative RSI divergence for the better part of the last year. We should not jump the gun with bearish scenarios, but as always we want to be among those looking forward and ready, just like in 2007, which was the last time BKX-SPX began to roll over in earnest.

bkx

(more…)