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.
We take the Way Back machine to a time of normalcy and plenty, in the 50’s when the stock market did okay but savers were paid (through T Bill yields) to do the most prudent thing people in a natural economy can do… save. Ever since 1980 the theme has been for the nation to eat its seed corn, with asset owners getting increasingly more portly in the process and savers nudged ever further out to the margin. The S&P 500 has sure got no complaints these days. It’s in lockstep with policy.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal dove head first into the deep end of the interactive social media swimming pool. During their FOMC pregame show, they punctually trotted out Johnny Waterboy Hilsenrath via SpreeCast, the sparkling new-media darling interactive webcast platform, to serve up another fresh jug of spiked reinvigorating Gatorade to his favorite NY Stock Market team. (more…)
Well, here we are again. On Wednesday, an elderly dwarf will capture the attention of the entire financial world as she bleats out whatever she and her minions believe will shore up the house of cards they have created. In a sane and just world, the aforementioned bridge troll would be an untenured economics professor at a mid-tier liberal arts college, but as it is now, Yellen is one of the most powerful humans (more or less) on the planet.
We are six years………..six.……..years……….into this madness, and it shows no sign of stopping. Why should it? After all, statists and central planners have been doing a bang-up job of making the rich richer (which, in spite of the weary “dual mandate” trotted out in front of a smirking Congress, appears to be the only true raison d’etre behind the Federal Reserve). (more…)
This is going to be a review of David Stockman’s 768-page tome The Great Deformation, and 
although I never thought it was possible, it makes me angry to write this book review.
I’m not angry because I don’t like the book. On the contrary, this is the best economics book I’ve ever read. Indeed, it may be the best and most influential book I’ve ever read in my life. I only wish I had read it the moment it was published in April 2013. I only finished reading it today, and for the entire time I’ve been plowing through it, I’ve been trying to think of what I would say in this review.
Why am I angry, then, to write this? Bluntly stated, because nothing I can say will make what I want a reality. And what I want is for every literate person in the United States to read this book, cover to cover. I want them to read it. I want them to understand it. I want them to agitate for the changes that it recommends. (more…)
Left without the original clean source of healthy naturally effervescent American spring water abundantly spouting up from the bedrock below, the misguided monetary authorities have dangerously attempted to artificially inseminate the clouds above, in the hopes of drenching the parched U.S. soil below with torrential rain, so as to generate their much heralded and forever promised green shoots. Regrettably for us all, when these artificially seeded clouds eventually do burst, they will produce nothing but the toxic inflationary rains of StealthFlation. (more…)
