Sweeping up after the latest looting spree in Chicago (photo via The Chicago Sun-Times).
(more…)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.
Metals Ups and Downs
This week, gold and silver continue to make sweeping historical moves. On one hand, the gold price broke through first $1850, then $1900 within two days. On the other hand, the silver price exceeded $20 on July 20th, then saw $21, $22, and $23 in the following days. Although the silver price doesn’t seem much more significant as compared to the gold price, silver actually increased faster. Therefore, silver is currently outperforming gold. So what caused this monumental change with gold and silver?
Precious metals such as gold and silver are “safe haven” assets. This is because these metals are precious, highly liquid, low-risk, and carry their own values. Since the production of precious metals is controlled, their supply is balanced, which helps retain their prices. However, COVID is one major factor that helped spike precious metals’ prices. In addition to gold and silver, platinum is up this week.
(more…)The Big Picture Continuum
The Continuum (monthly 30yr yield with the 100 month EMA ‘limiter’) simply states that the economy was weakening, as were inflation expectations, before 2020. In early 2020 we got a real deflationary jolt from which asset markets are still clawing back, with full frontal inflationary support from a Federal Reserve desperate to keep asset owners whole (and further enriched) and to further punish savers and those without the means to invest in the racket.
They called Ben Bernanke “the Hero” but he was actually the perpetrator of the next debt-backed inflation that would further ruin the country, primarily by greatly increasing the divide between asset owners and everyone else. If we had taken the pain in 2008 and 2009 we’d be on a new system now. Instead, we are riding the Greenspan>Bernanke>Powell continuum. Yellen is omitted because nothing egregious happened under her watch. She slipped in between the cycles and fell through the cracks.
(more…)Silver/Gold Ratio Hits Target
The NFTRH plan is and has been that the gold mining sector, due to the fundamentals implied by the handy graphic below, could eventually lead a world full of inflatables higher. The miners, leveraging gold’s out performance to most everything else during liquidity crises and even deflation, move first and draw in the inflationist bugs later. If the macro goes inflationary the miners will likely continue to perform well (ref. the 2003-2008 period) but would no longer be the go-to sector.
The Sordid (Pictorial) Story of the “Richest Country in the World”
Steve Saville’s excellent post The monetary inflation moonshot (including the graph directly below) prompted me to go to the St. Louis Fed website and check out some COVID-era data graphs.
So in addition to Steve’s calculation of the moonshot in new (funny) munny, which if we’re being honest is the only trick in the Fed’s bag, here are some other pictures from the financial and economic system of what we are told is the “richest country in the world” (if you don’t count debt and the leveraging thereof).
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