Below is a plot of the economic center, geographically, for the past couple thousand years. The massive shift from 1820 to 1913 was thanks to the U.S., whereas the equally large shift from 2000 to 2025 was due to China.
The Gravity of China
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.
ChatGPT for You & Me
Future of Mineral Exploration
Mineral Exploration: 18 years in the desert, the times they are a changin’
[edit] Also reference the September 3 article Junior Mining Basket Case.
The area of mineral exploration has long been cast aside. Whether precious (Gold, Silver) or more economically strategic (Rare Earth, Platinum/Palladium, Uranium, Copper and Nickel, etc.). This area has long been ignored in favor of sexier stuff over any given period during those 18 years. You know, Cloud/SaaS, Solar/EV and most recently, AI. The sexy stuff driven to over-valuation by rolling emotional hysterias. In other words, the stock market.
Gold stocks had been such a cast aside area. Producers, royalties, maturing developers of mines. The whole world appears to be getting in on the play now. But it’s got a lot further to go pending the next real correction. Now, the cat (the price of the HUI Gold Bugs Index) is out of the bag. My long-held target of 500 is history, at least so far on this move.
(more…)Fakeout City
As I’m typing this, Powell is still doing his press conference, so the market’s gyrations are still flying. All equity futures have been spasming up and down since the announcement. One particularly interesting item is that the small caps as measured by IWM, at long last, roared to a lifetime high (besting the prior record) only to slip back below it. It’ll be interesting to see if we close below that level.
Watch This Gap!
