Somebody should DO something!
More Inequality
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.
Directional Dependency
At some point, perhaps soon, the Fed is going to start reducing interest rates. The assumption is that, once that starts, it’s going to be party time for stocks (as if 2023 wasn’t a party enough). That’s true sometimes, but it turns out that it is utterly dependent on whether we enter a recession or not. As the chart below suggests, stocks do tend to go up once Fed starts cutting (upper-right portion of the chart below), but in instances in which the economy is entering a recession, the stock market not only falls, but it falls a lot more than it rises otherwise.
On Corruption
The subject of corruption has been on my mind recently, for reasons that I cannot get into and probably never will be able to articulate, but the inspiration hardly matters. If you had asked me a week ago was “corruption” meant, I would have stated roughly what most people might, which is that it has to do with things like bribing a government official. In other words, a way to bend the rules in your favor by doing something for someone else.
My notion of corruption has broadened, or at least changed, quite a lot in the past few days. Now, I think of corruption as what is going on inside a black box. In a normal system, if “A” goes into the box, and you can expect “B” to come out, then “B’ emerges. However, if “X” emerges, there’s something foul afoot inside. It isn’t operating as expected. The innards of this hypothetical box are………….corrupted. Because the outcome does not comport with the expectation.
(more…)The Opposition
As we approach the end of 2023, I sense that it’s the upside-down version of the end of 2022. Back then, it was universally agreed there would be a recession and that equities were a disaster. These days, folks looking at 2024 universally agree that it’s going to be all about rate cuts and daily lifetime highs in equities. Sentiment is absolutely euphoric, and I’ve got to say, looking at these major index charts (which are either at lifetime highs or poised to achieve them), I wonder if they’re right.
(more…)
