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.
The Fourth Turning – Finally
After many instances of prodding from readers, I finally bought and read The Fourth Turning, and I'm sorry that I waited so long. It was a superb read, and it puts into words (340 pages of words, in fact) the general feeling I've had for so long that something big and bad is happening all around us.
I want to emphasize at the outset that this isn't some doom 'n' gloom book that came off the presses after all the calamities we've seen over the past decade. It is, in fact, a fifteen-year old book, and I imagine much of it was written around 1995 or so, during the feel-good Clinton years. When the book came out in 1997, the authors made clear that they were currently in the Third Turning, and that the Fourth Turning – the final quarter of a cycle that they postulate recurs throughout modern human history – was coming around 2005 or so.
Strauss and Howe write:
Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a turning – every two decades or so….Together the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, naturation, entropy, and destruction:
+ The First Turning is a High; an upbeat era of strengthening instutitions and weakening individualism;
+ The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spirtual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime;
+ The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strrengtening individualism and weakening institutions;
+ The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.
Re-Election Politics and The Market Outcome (by Ryan Mallory)
If you are like me, and live in a swing-state for this 2012 election, you are absolutely sick and tired of the ads, smears, lies, and just everything politics. I give more thought to moving to North Dakota every time an election cycle rolls around just to avoid the onslaught of ads, mailings, and phone calls.
But my question to you is, how does the market fare when it comes to a President seeking re-election? What is the norm and how does the market tend to react. As a result, I looked at every successful and unsuccessful re-election bid, dating back 32 years to to the Carter Vs. Reagan election to see if there was anything worth noting particularly from August through November (Elections occur on the second Tuesday of the month).
Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan: 1980
Despite the 70's being pretty miserable for the economy, from August to November things seemed 'suddenly favorable' when Carter's re-election came up. In particular the early part of August. What this chart should show you though (and later with Bush Sr.) is that despite a market rally into the election, it is no guarantee that a President will be re-elected.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
I just finished Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. It is superb, and I've spent a fair amount of time typing in passages from the book below in order to capture some of its theme.
The "me" of twenty years ago wouldn't be caught dead reading a book like this. It is, after all, an unflinching assasination of our present capitalist system. As a younger person, I was wholeheartedly (and more than a little ignorantly) devoted to a dog-eat-dog, lassiez-faire capitalist system. And, in my adult life, I have lived that way, at least inasmuch as I created, built, and sold a successful business and have, before, during, and after that time, been a very active participant in the financial markets (both by way of trading as well as writing).
Experience and observation have moderated my views, however. At the outset I will say that I still regard capitalism as the most proper, natural, and constructive economic system, but I'm a much firmer believer in a modified version – – consistently-regulated with a distribution of wealth more akin to the 1970s than the present day – – than I ever imagined I would be.
This passage from the preface of the book captures the pages that follow nicely:
The ruthless hunt for profit creates a world where everything and everyone is expendable. Nothing is sacred. It has blighted inner cities, turned the majestic Appalachian Mountains into a blasted moonscape of poisoned water, soil, and air. It has forced workers into a downward spiral of falling wages and mounting debt until laborers in agricultural fields and sweatshops work in conditions that replicate slavery. It has impoverished our working class and ravaged the middle class. And it has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.
Surrender to the Facts………………….(by BDI)
Surrender to the Facts
Please take a moment to carefully review the mind jarring tables above. Perhaps the staggering number of casualties inflicted in what was by far the most brutal military conflict in modern history, will make you better appreciate why I may seem a bit defensive when it comes to all the white flag waving jokes about the French on SOH.
