Slope of Hope

Status Quo means Hillary. Financial Mayhem means Bernie. Fear means Trump.

Slope of Hope celebrated its 10th anniversary last March, and during the course of 2015, thousands of interesting charts and articles were published. Here's a sampling of the best of them:

If anyone on this planet could be accused of tying Marissa Mayer's sexuality to her career, I think one need look no farther than the woman herself.

I had never heard the term "safe space" until just a few days ago, but it's a zone in which free speech is completely forbidden, for fear of hurting the feelings of some special snowflake.

Now that Chipotle's e. coli outbreak had shuttered places all over the Pacific Northwest, I'm even more content to enjoy the fabulous, inexpensive fare at my local Los Gallos

I thought I'd change my tone and write up a genuinely positive, optimistic post. This has to do with what I think will be a tectonic shift over the next twenty years: transportation.

Hey, everybody. Look, I sort of fell out of the public eye once people stopped eating Wheaties, and I'm glad to have a second career as a reality show freak.

My favorite sector to short  is (once again) energy, as giants like Exxon are exhibiting topping patterns that strike me as once-a-generation opportunities.

Sometimes less is more (less good data is moar good for stocks) and in the case of Marc Faber's recent appearance on Bloomberg's "What'd You Miss", 66 seconds of honesty was all that the hosts could take. The Gloom, Boom & Doom report editor notes "we have had a meaningful decline in many stocks already," and warns it is far from over as market face two possibilities of "longer-term unattractiveness": "a 1987-style collapse," or a 1973-74-style slow "sliding slope of hope."

As we head into another earnings season, the bulls better pray to whatever pagan gods they worship that company after company magically defy the downturn that the economy is quite obviously entering.

But the aforementioned weasel words provide the best of both worlds: if commodities rally, then he can point to "nailing the bottom" with this interview. On the other hand, if commodities continue to sink, as I imagine they generally will, then he's got about five different escape hatches in this verbiage so that he's off the hook.

I think we're witnessing a sea change in the behavior of WalMart, and this is probably a helpful harbinger of the American economy as a whole.

It wasn't really clear to me how popular their site was, though, until the news hit on April 23, 1998 that Silicon Investor had been bought by go2net for $33,000,000 in stock. Now keep in mind this was just a discussion board we're talking about, little more sophisticated than the dial-up BBS's I had enjoyed back in 1981 on my TRS-80.

From our perspective, the fundamental reason for economic stagnation and growing income disparity is straightforward: Our current set of economic policies supports and encourages a low level equilibrium by encouraging debt-financed consumption and discouraging saving and productive investment. We permit an insular group of professors and bankers to fling trillions of dollars about like Frisbees in the simplistic, misguided, and repeatedly destructive attempt to buy prosperity by maximally distorting the financial markets.

There are five charts that I think speak to the good prospects for bearishness.