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.

Silver Has Broken Trend, But…

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Very simply, the weekly moving average that contained silver through its bear market has been broken to the upside. That is another booster of our assertion from earlier in the year that any coming blow off would not be terminal (ref. early 2011) but rather the completion of a launch phase off the bottom. This will be the case as long as silver is above the weekly EMA 55.

silver

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At the Gateway to a New Phase

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[edit] I got the shivers when I read TK’s post about Gartman being still “bearish of stocks” as it seems to lend credibility to the bullish scenario.

The market, despite weakening corporate profits and several other headwinds, has decided it liked what it heard from the Inflator in Chief yesterday as it has scored the game Janet Yellen 2, Hawks in Drag 1 and US dollar 0. Is it a final score? I am not sure how our hawkish transvestites can be taken seriously now.

But with a market running on the black boxes of a million quants, large and small, who knows what will happen the next time some clown decides to eat a microphone and dispense dissonance into a situation that Yellen seems very clear on; as my late friend Jonathan Auerbach once famously said (it was famous to me anyway) as we prepared for the post-2008 inflation phase, “it’s inflation all the way baby!”

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Macro Changes and Future Inflation Problems

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macrocosmEver since beginning the ‘Macrosom‘ theme in July (and updating it here), NFTRH has been managing macro changes that would positively affect the gold sector, and quite possibly have a negative effect on broad stock markets. Early on in the precious metals bear market we noted they were “in the mirror” and opposite the stock market, which on the post-2011 cycle has been the beneficiary of the Fed’s inflation, instilling confidence in their policies by conventional market participants (after all, the right assets were going up on this cycle). In August, it appeared that the first real thrust in the direction of our macro theme kicked in as the stock market cracked.

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The Clown Show Has Come and Gone

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The opening segment from this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole has a little fun with the post-FOMC market situation. Unfortunately, there is all too much reality in this clowning around. From NFTRH 387:

Our main theme has been that the ironclad post-2011 confidence in the Federal Reserve among conventional market participants would slowly but surely start to fade because macro parlor tricks, so vigorously employed by the Bernanke Fed, were only tricks or in some cases (Operation Twist) borderline magic, after all.

clowncar

At biiwii.com (still unsure if or in what capacity the site may reappear) we used to have fun with clown car videos, as the various Fed members piled out honking horns, doing somersaults and shouting incomprehensible phrases and announcements.

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Growth or Inflation?

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The Federal Reserve states that its goal is to promote employment and economic growth while regulating inflation. As if it is as simple as pulling levers, tweaking a few knobs and dialing up just the right amount of inflation per unit of economic growth. The hubris and ego involved here is incredible.

For the last several years global macro dynamics had allowed the Fed to operate in a highly inflationary manner, while inflation’s effects discretely festered in areas of the ‘services’ economy (like healthcare, regulatory entities, real estate, leisure and hospitality and certain food items). It became clear to me that despite commodities driving down the raw costs of doing business, inflation’s effects had embedded in the services economy when my trash hauler informed of a rate increase due to regulations in the services chain, despite the crash in fuel costs. That is just one little example. Larger examples infect the entire economy.

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