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.

Uh-Oh……..

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I’m afraid I might have some bad news for the bears and, frankly, I’m not that surprised, because things have been absolutely glorious for a few days now, and “a few days” is about the lifespan of happiness for the bearish set.

What I am referring to is what I call the Fed Spread, which is probably a misleading and inaccurate term, but it’s my shorthand way of saying “The calculation of a bunch of Federal Reserve data that comes out every Thursday afternoon and does a good job predicting the S&P two weeks into the future.” See, it just comes out easier my way.

Over the past few days, a major bank has failed pretty much every single day (Silicon Valley Bank, then Signature, then First Republic, then Credit Suisse………you get the idea) and, naturally, the central bankers of the world did the only thing they know how to do, which is to throw literally trillions of dollars at the problem.

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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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