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.

Civil Servants

By -

I really should know better by now, but I still get amazed when I see the obscene salaries that bureaucrats and civic employees get. I can’t imagine anyone less motivated, industrious, or clever than a government employee, and yet thanks to their unions, they get salaries that far exceed the average compensation at Goldman Sachs (or Apple or Google, for that matter). The truth value of these employees is, I am highly confident, about 66% less than they are paid.

There’s a crummy little town near Palo Alto called Redwood City – – it’s a real shithole, except for a few good taco joints – – that spends over $100 million for its government. This is a “city” of 82,000 people, and one glance will show you the largesse that they’ve granted themselves…..

0426-one

(more…)

CIA, WikiLeaks & iWatch

By -

In this new world of technology and its attendant problems of the hacking of gadgets and products, Apple’s iWatch now takes on a whole new meaning after WikiLeaks published material yesterday that is purported to be CIA documents and files related to U.S. intelligence cyber and spying activities.

Apple (AAPL) is nearing a convergence of a couple of Fibonacci levels that may serve as resistance around 145.00-146.00, as shown on the following Weekly chart.

(more…)

The Deregulation Myth

By -

I was aghast this week when I read that Trump was going to torpedo the Dodd-Frank regulations. As a people, we learned precious little from the sins that led up to the financial crisis. Famously, not a single person went to jail, and over the past eight years of “healing”, the bankers have simply become richer……..and richer……….and richer.  The icing on the cake just came, with the feeble regulations that were enacted to reign them in being sent to the chopping block.

It got me thinking to the last time the government torpedoed well-meaning bank regulations, and that was with the the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act. This act of Congress, which torched the Glass-Steagall law, established a foundation for the financial crisis that would take place years later.

(more…)