Forty Trillion isn’t far away, folks.
Another American First!
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.
A Plausible U.S.-China Grand Bargain
That Escalated Fast
This week escalated fast: Beijing moved to tighten rare-earth export controls, and late Friday the U.S. answered with an additional 100% tariff headline. Markets read “decouple”—but the sequence matters.
(more…)Full Faith & Credit? Ha!
Let’s just say that the world has decided shiny, nice-to-feel GOLD has become more appealing than sheets of paper with American bric-a-brac printed all over it.
New Highs All Round
In my post on Friday 26th September I was putting the case that the modest retracement that we saw that week might well be over, and in my post on Monday 29th September I was outlining the still possible option that we might nonetheless see another leg down on US indices, though I was assigning that a low probability.
Equity indices resolved higher as expected, and we have seen new all time highs made last week on SPX, QQQ, DIA and IWM. My personal view is still that US equity indices are likely heading higher into the end of the year unless we start seeing strong breaks of the support at the daily middle bands that were backtested and held on SPX, DIA and IWM in the late September lows.
How will that be affected by the current government shutdown? Well that rather depends on how long it lasts, and the longer that lasts the more likely it is that we see equity markets weaken. Looking at the chart below there is a significant negative lean historically for these though I’d note that of the twenty government shutdowns listed on the chart below, the last five starting in Nov’ ‘95 all closed green, with a real outlier in the last one in December ‘18 which was the most bullish shutdown since 1976.
(more…)Make a New Record!
Trump was President during the last two. Since he’s so addicted to “winning“, maybe he can give us a new record length of shutdown! May I suggest a decade?
