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.

Tuba Mirum Spargens Sonum

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I rarely got told ‘no” as a child.

The reason, mainly, was that I asked for so little. It’s not like we were destitute. We were a perfectly normal middle-class family. It’s just that, for whatever reason, I never felt inclined to bug my parents for this-or-that. Even if the thing I wanted cost maybe two bucks, I didn’t have the heart to bug them.

It isn’t that I didn’t want anything, though. I would see things on television, or in stores, which would absolutely captivate me, but even though I was never admonished to not ask for “stuff”, I instinctively refrained from doing so. Maybe it was a sense of decency toward my family. Or maybe I was too afraid of being disappointed. Whatever the reason, I didn’t ask.

But the memories are still there. Allow me to share with you some of the trifles that I wanted so badly as a child, but never asked my parents to buy.

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Fiscal Fantasy

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I cannot imagine any other time in the history of this country where people felt so confident, so placid, and so assured about their investments. And why wouldn’t they be? Every year, every month, every week, and every moment, it has been made crystal clear to “investors” that their risks will be rewarded, and their losses will be reversed. Sure, at first, people doubted it, because that’s not how markets work. But after the past 33 years – – this all began in earnest in 1987 – – people have been “saved” countless times, and it is considered a truism that there’s really no such thing as risk anymore.

Join me on a brief fantasy, however, and a thought experiment. I’d like you to embrace your most imaginative self and briefly accept a circumstance in which the following has taken place.

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