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.

A Key US Dollar Fundamental

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The following is the Currencies segment of this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole, NFTRH 546. The fate of the US dollar will of course play into a global macro trade per Friday’s post.

Currencies

A reminder that we are not using the standard gold bug method of evaluating the USD (perma “death to the dollar!!”). We are using fundamentals in evaluating its potential to correct (and launch a global macro trade). The blue shaded boxes on this weekly chart tell the story of Fed policy (Fed Funds/3 mo. T-Bill) that significantly lagged the upturn in the 2yr yield into late 2015. But USD turned up much earlier (in 2014) to follow the 2yr.

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Behold the Data Panel

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I am absolutely thrilled to announce an improvement to SlopeCharts that I believe will be transformative: the Data Panel.

Now, on the surface, some of you may look at this thing and say: “So what?” Perhaps you aren’t as zealous about SlopeCharts as I am. But, I can assure you, it’s a big deal.

Those of you who have played with SlopeCharts even a little bit know that, to date, the leftmost portion of the product was dedicated to watch lists. That is still the case, but now we’ve transformed it into an area that can hold all kinds of information. Here’s a taste:

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Pendulum

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Allow me to start off what is intended as an economic musing by referring to a favorite comic of mine, Patton Oswalt. He has a fairly new bit in which he explains the Trump phenomenon as a totally understandable response to the Obama presidency.

The political pendulum in America, deep in the throes of the financial crisis, had swung so far that the United States elected its first black President, and a rather progressive one. After eight years of that, the “mirrored” response was to elect a political novice known principally as the billionaire star of a reality television show.

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