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.

Crypto is Dying

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Way back on February 2nd, I wrote a post called Follow Bitcoin which suggested that equities would slavishly follow the path of crypto, because crypto, Bitcoin in particular, is not only an important liquidity indicator but it also captures the overall zeitgeist and confidence of the assets market.

Having observed what has transpired this month, it seems this goofy notion is actually quite on the mark, particularly since my post, as the layered chart vividly illustrates below (QQQ in blue, BTC in black).

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Deep Tracks

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As a starting point, I suggest you take a quick look at this post from a decade ago as well as this more recent one. They both relate to something I’ve written about a number of times, which is teens hurling themselves in front of trains here in my otherwise gentle town of Palo Alto.

It happened again this week, with one Summer Devi Mehta, a young person at Palo Alto High School who threw herself in front of CalTrain at 10:13 on Tuesday morning. What’s quite unusual is that Summer published a suicide note for all to see before she killed herself. It reads as follows.

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Silver Hunt (Part 1 of 3)

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Preface: due to the intense interest in silver these days, I have decided to share a chapter from my Panic Prosperity and Progress book which focuses on the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy it.

Precious Metals and the Destruction of a Billionaire

The stunning bull market in precious metals in the late 1970s, followed by its swift collapse, has a fascinating and remarkable history. The roots of the event date back to the dark days of the Great Depression, when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 which outlawed the “hoarding” (that is, the ownership in almost any form) of gold by any person or other entity within the United States.

Prior to this order, gold was intricately intertwined in the nation’s currency. U.S. dollars were convertible into gold on demand, and this convertibility had helped constrict the velocity of money severely. Roosevelt recognized that inflating the money supply was essential to turning the economy around, so he took the extraordinary step of criminalizing private ownership of gold as one of the steps to decouple the precious metal from the nation’s currency.

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