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 Cold Financial War

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When I was a lad, the Cold War was still humming along as it had been for decades. Even as a child, I had a strong sense of what was going on and what I felt was right and wrong. I perceived my native United States as a place of individual freedom and open choices. I perceived the USSR as an evil prison housing hundreds of millions of poor souls who were under the thumb of an oppressive government. When Reagan described them as “An Evil Empire”, I was in total agreement.

What was particularly nauseating to me was how the Soviet government would shameless and persistently lie to its own people. They would always offer assurances that everything was under control, everything was going to plan, and everything was going to be fine. They were able to sustain that lie from 1919 until 1989, but then it all came crashing down. At the time, it seemed the world had finally come to its senses.

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Banks: The Eye Of The Hurricane?

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Hurricane Florence photographed from space.

The Eye of The Storm

As I type this early Monday morning, stock futures are up, after Sunday’s federal bailouts of depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The obvious weather analogy here is the sun coming out after a heavy storm, but the big question is whether that storm was a cyclonic one like a hurricane (or typhoon, for Asian readers) or not. The sun also comes out when you’re in the eye of a hurricane, but it’s followed by a second part of the storm. 

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