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.

Pre-Dawn Cleaner

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Hello, everyone, from the delicious dark and quiet suburban paradise of Palo Alto. True to form, the nation’s pundits and basement traders are loudly touting how the market is going STRAIGHT UP from these levels. Indeed, even on the likes of ZeroHedge are featuring prominent articles about……..

  • the market is really, really, really oversold;
  • the corporate swine will start buying literally billions of dollars of their own stock, every single weekday, with hundreds and hundreds of billions already approved by corporate boards;
  • “everyone is bearish” (AKA more than 1% of the public)
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Scheduled to be Slayed

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We have not had an honest-to-God bear market in ninety years. But what about 2008? Or 2001? Or 1987? Yeah, yeah, the market went down, it’s true, but in every single down-market since the 1930s, the federal government has intervened to stop the bleeding. The natural, organic, and marvelously healthy process of a sweeping financial cleaning hasn’t been permitted since the days of FDR, since the nanny state government feels duty-bound to spare its citizens anything that might hurt even a little bit.

The last big cleaning – – which spanned 1929 to 1933 – – spawned laws and cultural changes that benefited the United States for nearly seventy years before they were dismantled. The most egregious “help” the government has offered came, of course, during the last little downturn, during a few weeks in late February and early March of 2020, which was met with trillions and trillions of dollars of stimulus, forgiveness, and all-around federal fellatio.

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