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.

Blimey!

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Because I am a deeply-troubled person, I spent my Sunday morning looking at centuries-old financial data from the United Kingdom. SlopeCharts – – which, if you’re not, you really should be using – – has a jaw-dropping amount of data in its economic database, and for a lunatic like me, it’s great fun just trawling through it. Here are some gems I found (descriptions captioned):

slopechart FR PSNLBUKA
Here is the government’s surplus or deficit going back to the 1600s. What’s remarkable to me is that the enormous expense of World War 1 and 2 is a barely-discernible bump.
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Japanese Reflection (3 of 4)

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I’ve been pleasantly surprised that some of my most popular posts are excerpts from the only history book I ever wrote, Panic, Prosperity, and Progress. Over this holiday weekend, I’ll be sharing, over the course of four days, the chapter dedicated to the inflation and bursting of the Japanese bubble of the 1980s. I think you’ll find some interesting parallels with China. You can read the first part here and second part here.

Japan’s economic growth did not, of course, go unnoticed by its stock market. The Nikkei 225 index, which stood at a price level of 1929 on May 31, 1970, grew steadily to 5359 by January 31 of 1973, an expansion of 177%. By August 31, 1981, the Nikkei stood at 8019, a growth of about 315% from the 1970 level. As tremendous as those returns are, looking at the long-term chart of the Nikkei, the growth was relatively steady and, in light of the bubble to come, quite muted.

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