I’ll do something “market-ish” later this afternoon. But this is fun:
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.
Old School Fake News
It’s a quiet Sunday morning, and since there’s really nothing going on, I’d like to share with you a fun read in the form of an excerpt from the one history book I ever wrote, Panic, Prosperity, and Progress. It just goes to show that “fake news” is not an invention of the modern age, particularly when it comes to the financial markets:
Just as the value of the Greyback behaved as a proxy for the South’s war prospects, the value of gold reflected the military success (or setbacks) for the Union. Although financial markets were quite primitive at the time, necessity being the mother of invention led to the creation of “gold rooms” where spirited bidding would take place. A contemporary wrote of one such room, evoking the intensity of the scene that isn’t far removed from a modern-day account of a commodity exchange:
(more…)Episode IX
Lost Soul
Pavel
There’s been no larger cultural influence in my life than the original series of Star Trek. We’ve been losing the stars over time – – Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan. Walter Koenig is still going, and I enjoyed this interview with him:
Captain Moral!
I’ve seen in the papers that the new movie Shazam is going very well. I’m sort of amused to hear this, and good for the moviemakers for doing something fun and campy. When I was a kid, Shazam was one of my favorite Saturday morning shows. (It later hooked up with Isis, sort of the girl’s equivalent of Shazam, to form the Shazam/Isis Hour).
The show focused on a kid named Billy in his late teens (who apparently only owned one shirt) and a old fella (who apparently only owned one jacket) whom he referred as “Mentor” (although he always said it sort of odd…….Men-Tor).
They roamed “the highways and byways of the land” in this big-ass, gas-guzzling recreational vehicle which was equipped with a red hemisphere that had lights on it. By putting his hand on the hemisphere, Billy could transport himself to be standing in front of a group of badly-animated Greek gods and seek their counsel.
(more…)Jumping the Gun
There are a lot of things I like about ZeroHedge (I read it multiple times a day), but I’ve got a few gripes. First, their comments section, as some of you know, is a brutal cesspool. Second, on occasions when there are data spikes in a feed (thus producing a corresponding huge spike in a chart), they will write up a “WTF??” article about it as if it was real, even though it isn’t.
But perhaps what bugs me most of all is this kind of thing:
