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 Point Three Illusion

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The latest fixation is Tuesday morning’s CPI, in which we all pretend that inflation is running at 0.3% per month (as opposed to the closer-to-the-truth 3% a month, just in case you haven’t bought anything in the past few years and noticed the gargantuan price increases of everything). Anyway, here is the government data they’ve dreamed up, as well as the morning’s anticipated pipsqueak inflation rate.

Based on the market utterly shrugging off the Moody’s news, it’s clear that everyone and his non-binary brother thinks that it’s nothing but up, up, up from here on with equities.

Downgrade Slow Fade

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I’m starting to wonder what it’s going to take.

Last night, I was unaware that Moody’s had even put the U.S. on its watch list, and it seems the market didn’t realize it either. The futures opened basically unchanged and ever-so-slowly creeped down for a few hours. Since then, then have erased a portion of those losses, and as I am composing this seventy-five minutes before the opening bell, the potential downgrade of the debt of the United States is crashing the S&P 500 futures by all of one-fifth of one percentage point.

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