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.

Gold Miners Start to Fail

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As we step toward a counter-cyclical macro, the fundamentals will finally improve for gold mining

From a June 19th interview I did with with Jordan Roy Byrne with respect to gold stocks, Energy and the proper macro fundamentals for the gold mining sector:

In my experience gold stocks will… they can paint ugly charts and then follow through on those ugly charts. But when a crash finally happens it’s almost poetic in that it’s like the final surrender of the inflationists. The ones who were packed in the sector for the wrong reasons because… ‘buy gold, buy silver, buy hogs, buy copper, buy oil’. No. You buy gold during weakness and when it would look forward to the new easing… of policy makers. The new dove regime or whatever. But it happens amid deflationary pressure.

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The Purple Pill

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“You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”  -Morpheus

A ‘blended’ orientation to markets and life…

I took a red pill, dropped into a rabbit hole and entered Wonderland in 2003 and lived down that hole for 2 years before I decided, ‘eh… not for me’. Paranoia 24/7 while trying to raise kids and keep a healthy marriage was not the way to go (though positives like an understanding of the value of gold, real gold, alternative heating sources (wood stoves), a generator and the means for the physical protection of my family came out of that phase.

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Fed, Gold, and Market Power

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The stock market is very predictable in its Fed obsession

A frustration of dyed in the wool gold bugs is that a debt soaked system moves forward on little more than the confidence that all will remain as it has been. This confidence focuses on the Federal Reserve and it’s ability to inflate the system when needed.

But the flip side of that ‘in the Fed we trust’ mindset is the very real fear instilled in market participants (and implied fear programmed into their machines) when the Fed is forced by the very inflation it created to attempt to destroy its inflated Frankenstein monster at all costs.

“Forced”, you say? Yes, forced I say. From this February 10th post:

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Gold is About Value

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Gold and gold miners have two completely different utilities

Gold is…

A pretty rock that is dug out of the ground. This heavy rock has been assigned value by humans since time immemorial. That value has been its stability as an asset, a refuge from the excesses of rampant speculation, the likes of which often visit stocks (e.g. climaxes in 2000, 2007 and 2022) and sometimes commodities (e.g. 2008, 2011 and 2022). Gold is a good proxy for money, or what money should be. A stable entity retaining value through the up and down cycles over decades and centuries.

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