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.

FOMC Eve

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The last FOMC meeting is tomorrow (cue the music to “Eight is Enough”, if anyone can remember it) and the world can fully embrace one of the great Buy the Rumor/Sell the News events of the year. A pointless 25 basis point is on the way, which will be as potent a salve for the economy as wrecking exports for farmers and then handing the same farmers a huge bailout for their trouble. God Bless America.

Equities seem to have stalled out in recent days, as illustrated by the /NQ, which is so laughably bloated and overvalued as to merit astonishment a few years from now when folks look back at these prices.

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The Idiotic Premise

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Here is my understanding of what Trump’s administration thinks about the Fed, the Economy, and the Market:

  1. Jerome Powell is incompetent;
  2. The U.S. economy is like a huge pile of oily rags that is just needing something to light it in order to really catch fire, and that “something” is lower interest rates;
  3. Powell should be lowering rates massively, but he’s refusing to do so for political reasons;
  4. Once Trump installs one of his sycophantic cronies to head the Fed, the slashing of rates can begin;
  5. At which time the economy will be fabulous and the stock market will rush into the stratosphere since, you know, it’s like totally cheap and massively undervalued right now.

Every single one of these things is dead wrong, yet people are too stupid or too politically loyal to dare think or say so. Probably stupid, for the most part. In any case, time will prove this entire thesis to be fantastically incorrect, and I will endlessly refer back to this very post.

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