Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Wednesday. The S&P 500 was up just a little bit over .1%. Today, the big winner today was really the Dow. First time in a while that we’ve seen the Value Stocks kind of outperform the stocks that did well last year. But, it’s bound to happen, we’re seeing this kind of back and forth rotation and whatnot. But this week is really about jobs, and the job numbers that are going to come out. So they’re going to report how many new jobs were created last month, on Friday, and so that’s a big deal. Three months ago, we had roughly 267,000 jobs, and then last month, 566,000. This month, they’re expecting 700,000, so you know, we’ll see what happens. But in order for the market and the economy to really get going, we’ve got to get people back to work.
There is still 7.9 million less people working right now, than was working prior to the pandemic starting. Now, one of the fascinating things is the Gross Domestic Product, which you can kind of look at as the revenue for the whole country is actually back to where it was, and so we’re doing that with less people. But if you really want to see that go, and you really want to see things happen, one of the big drivers will be jobs. You know, we’re talking about the Federal Reserve as a big driver. Inflation itself is a big driver of those things, but not getting the jobs back is a key and it is the focus for the Federal Reserve. They’ve mentioned this over and over again, they want to get people back to work and get back to what they call full employment.
And so there was a survey that I read about today from a company called Indeed. So, Indeed is a job search site, and they did a big survey, and they found some things that were very fascinating. First of all, only 10% of the people that are unemployed are currently looking for work. That’s kind of surprising to me. And they said the number one reason that people aren’t looking for work is because they’re afraid of the virus. Well, a lot of the jobs that did get cancelled, that are now being reopened, are jobs that were higher risk for the virus, that’s why they were closed down for a while, originally. And so there’s people are obviously waiting to see what’s going to happen and, and how things work out with the vaccine and those types of things.
There are a couple of other areas where people talk about not wanting jobs, at least in the press. Well, they’re getting this $300 a week of extra payment, and they don’t need the job because of that. Now there’s 22 states that are canceling that extra payment, so we’ll get to see if that makes a difference or not coming up here pretty shortly. And of course, kids and dealing with the kids and obviously when school starts maybe that will solve that issue also. But, the issue that they’re dealing with is very fascinating here, because there are over 9 million jobs open right now. And more people are quitting right now than ever before, so there’s lots of job openings. Matter of fact, that 9 million new job openings is a record. There’s more jobs open now than ever in history. And yet, we’re still only getting 300,000, maybe 700,000 this month, new jobs created even though there are openings.
So, this is going to be the big interesting thing that happens. And so that’s the big thing that’s kind of sitting over this week, is really just the jobs report that’s going to come out Friday morning, and people are guessing what that might be and all those different things that happen every time. The market’s going to react different ways based on what that number comes out to, as far as that goes. So, that’s what’s happening right now. Market is kind of sitting there, more or less going sideways for the most part as far as that goes, but hanging in there and doing okay, I’ll take it what’s happening here. And, we’ll look forward to see what’s gonna happen tomorrow. I’ll talk to you then. Thank you very much.