Coffee is one of the commodities the world economy is running low on, per Bloomberg.
(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.
Not-So-Richmond
At the moment, I am in Richmond, Virginia. It reminds me in many ways of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I grew up. It’s the state capitol. It has a large black population. Most of the buildings are old. It rains. And they have some good food.
But they also have a breathtaking amount of shuttered storefronts. They are everywhere. And I’m in the nice part of town! I took this little video……….and every single block is like this:
Exporting Deflation
Three topics were dominating the news this morning: the Gates divorce, inflation, and the trade deficit.
I’ve got nothing to say about the Gates divorce, except that it’s shocking and saddening. I had always assumed their being a couple was eternal, but who knows what happened behind the scenes. I’ve got no chart for it.
As for the data news stories, I looked at our Economic Database for some charts. When I was growing up, inflation is all people thought about. Over the past thirty years, it had faded from the national conversation. Let’s just say I think it’s coming back in style and will be here for a long time to come.
Country Extremes
I was roaming through Visual Capitalist and noted these two interesting tables. One of them shows the richest countries in the world, with Luxembourg (“Gateway to Belgium“) at the tippy-top:
