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.

Played Like a Fiddle

By -

OK, the Fed day is over (we get eight of them a year), and Jerome managed to play the entire market like a master violinist. In our new USSR economy, the Fed is presumed to have clairvoyance beyond all others, and can confidently predict what’s going to this year, and next year, and even the year after that. That’s right: the Fed can tell you what the world is going to look like in 2023. Their Gartman-level track record gives them this right.

Thus, after a deep red morning, we saw this in the NQ………

nqup
(more…)

Two-Sided Coin

By -

There is a topic I believe is going to be exceptionally important over the next decade, and that is Central Bank Digital Currencies. Let me be clear at the outset that I am not a professional economist, nor am I a CBDC expert. I do have a couple of extra IQ points to rub together, however, and for both my sake and yours, I wanted to try to educate myself about this crucial topic.

It wasn’t all fun and games; reading some of the academia about this subject doesn’t exactly crackle with warm-blooded humanity, as with this excerpt:

When households endogenously select into banked and unbanked, the introduction of a CBDC, which pays interest and is assumed to be immune to theft, can be Pareto improving and always increases welfare of at least unbanked households. The economic mechanism driving the welfare implications focuses on the interaction between the new monetary policy tool introduced by an interest-bearing CBDC and banks’ limited commitment.

FEDS Notes, November 9, 2020, “Central Bank Digital Currency: A Literature Review”
(more…)