Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello everybody, welcome to Tuesday. Today, the S&P 500 was up .1%. Bit of a rocky day, but basically what I saw today was that the infrastructure bill passing, kind of I think out did the virus growth concerns that were happening for today. It was kind of a big deal: It passed the Senate 69 to 30. It’s a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. And when they first talked about infrastructure, there was some concern about creating a higher inflationary environment, but because it’s going to be spent out over a five to eight year period, I don’t think that’s a potential issue, as far as that goes. There’s money in there for roads and bridges. They’re working on kind of shoring up the public utilities against cyber attacks, they’re going to modernize or work on modernizing the electric grid, looking at broadband, the lead pipes in America, or supposedly from drinking water, as supposed to be replaced across the country. And we’re getting money towards the public, you know, transportation, airports, railroads, etc. So this could be a really big deal.
I mean, there’s a couple of pieces here that are important, I think, for the country. Number one is you invest in infrastructure: If it works, it goes to the right direction, theoretically, it creates a better environment to operate business with, could creates economic growth. But if you look at it from the other side, there could be some things that are even more important. They’ve identified 10 critical bridges, that if they went down would create an economic impact, because there’s so much activity that happens, connecting these two areas with these bridges. So if they can keep that from happening, if they can keep these cyber attacks from really happening and creating havoc and such to, that would be important. So I think these are that really big deal.
And that’s why we saw 69 senators vote for this, I think when you look at the whole project, and you look at how they’re doing it, and originally, there was some talk that this would all be funded by increasing corporate taxes or increasing personal taxes or capital gains taxes, that did not happen again. I think that’s another thing that the market would like, and so this is really fascinating. Still has to get through the house, so it’s got a little bit of time to go there. But altogether, I think it was a good day for that. The market seemed to like it. It definitely moved up pretty strongly on the announcement of what happened there. So let’s see what happens tomorrow. Look forward to talking to you then. Thank you very much.