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 Mining Macrocosm Fully Engaged

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As Inflation Bugs sell indiscriminately, the gold mining Macrocosm (of proper macro-fundamentals) is engaged

A man sits in the White house. A different kind of man. A man who does not like diplomacy or going along and getting along with his global counterparts. He likes throwing Spanners and Monkey Wrenches all around the macro. There may one day be revealed a positive outcome to this, through negotiations. But on the face of it, nobody wins a tariff war. Least of all the biggest consumerist nation on the planet.

Clicking the graphic will yield the reason that the veteran trader pictured with a pensive, almost resigned look on his face with a sea of red behind him, looks the way he does (they always seem to find just the right guy with just the right expression for the moment). The reason du jour this morning is China retaliation.

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Does Trump Realize What America Is?

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Trump appears to be using a 1970s, or worse, 1930s playbook; and those playbooks did not work even though the US had a large industrial base at those times

Note: I started writing on similar themes to this back in 2004, with FrankenMarket Lives.

Progress

Donald Trump appears to have some sort of fantasy about what America is. I share his pride in this country as it was in the WWII era and maybe beyond, into the 1970s. I am, shall we say mature of age as well. Not nearly Trump’s age, but old enough to remember the inflationary angst of the 1970s and interested enough in economics to know about the post-bubble Great Depression of the 1930s.

I write now as a former manufacturing person. As the threat of Japan’s industrial rise grew steadily in the 1980s, we had to abandon the old ways of doing things, like men cranking handles in a profession (precision machining) that was more craft than labor. In short, in this new globally competitive reality it was “automate or die”. We automated. That was progress. America’s industrial base, following the likes of Japan, progressed even as its gross industrial base contracted under global pressure and yes, the productivity of automation.

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2001: A Historical Odyssey For Gold Stocks

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One chart shows the details of an important historical analog for gold stocks

Through many years of frustration among gold bugs due to the failure of gold stock prices to leverage the gold price in a positive way, there were very clear reasons for that failure. Reasons why it was not only logical, but probable that gold stocks would continue to under-perform vs. their product.

The primary driver to gold stock under-performance was a new era of ever more monetary (Fed) and fiscal (Government) policy meddling that began in 2001 and probably blew off in the inflationary panic of 2020. I called it the “Age of Inflation on Demand“.

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Revaluing Gold Reserves & Paying Debt?

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What a Concept!

If the whispers of revaluing the US gold reserves prove true, it could be an instant boon to the peoples’ (currently debt-addled) asset base

Per the article’s comments, a reader asks how a revaluation of gold helps pay down debt unless you sell the gold? My answer: “I am not talking about paying down debt by selling gold. I am talking about paying down debt after addressing government waste. Two separate things; debt and the peoples’ assets (including gold). I should have made that clearer, I guess.”

This article is written by someone who has been no fan of Trump. I spent 4 years criticizing his first term presidency (as I did Biden’s in a different way). * Whether you love him or hate him, this article simply focuses on a couple of economically important areas and policies currently being floated.

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