Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
Regarding Social Security, the [recent] cost of living adjustment was 5.9%. Should I be worried about inflation? How does it affect my retirement and my expenses?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, so Social Security had the highest, announced the highest increase in their cost of living increase at 5.9%, highest in the last 40 years. And that’s a good thing in a way, unfortunately, the reason they’re doing that is because they’re the basket of goods that they look at have increased by 5.9%. And so it’s a little bit of an offset, right? So hey, you’re gonna get more money, but it’s probably going to cost more, you know, the grocery store and those types of things. So, but the nice thing is that we’re going to get more money. That’s super important. Because that, you know, all of those colons that we deal with the cost of living increases, the bigger that basis, the more it grows, you know, if you get a 1%, next year after 5.9, it’s a good thing altogether. I think it’s really a nice situation, as far as that goes. But it does show that there’s an inflationary pressure. And so how does that affect the stock market, right, which is the other area that might be important to you, you know, in your retirement, or if you’re heading towards your retirement, higher inflationary periods, are we going to drink here are inflationary periods are, are kind of interesting.
So if you saw a study just recently, that was very fascinating to me. And it showed that really, the worst periods for the stock market is when inflation moves quickly. And so if we look at the 10 year Treasury when it jumps in a fast fashion, versus a more even fashion, which makes sense, if you look at a company that’s trying to deal with the products and the things that are coming in, you know, having your inputs, jump up in price really quickly, before you can really increase the prices of your product, you know, and that can eat up some of the earnings as far as that goes, excuse me, a little bug. And so, overall, I think this environment will probably not be quite as inflationary, as we’re seeing here. Now, that will probably slow down, the Federal Reserve has been talking about 2022 being a much more normal year. So we’ll see how that plays out.
Having said that, the Federal Reserve is saying now that they think some of this transitionary inflation will be more or less transitionary than thought. So you know, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going to happen. It’s been a long time since we’ve been through a pandemic and a reopening. But it’s, it’s, it’s a concern, it’s something to think about is something to watch. But again, trying to project what it’s going to do, and then react to that, that hasn’t been working right now, you’re better off watching how this plays out, setting up kind of a broad base portfolio that can cover all the different bases, and then react to those situations. So if inflation truly does come, because we’ve been talking about inflation, since 2008, it hasn’t come yet, you know, this year’s inflation is really a result of a reopening a supply chain that’s been closed down. And the fact that we’re coming off of last year’s numbers that were very low, right, so we’ll see how that plays out.
So how much happens next year will be a much more interesting piece to me, but just watch the price, watch what’s going on in the market. And we’ll be able to tell and listen to these earnings calls, to see how much you know, impact we’re seeing of inflation on on the price. If you know, we don’t know what the demand elasticity is either, which just means that, you know, if a company can continue to increase its prices, and still get the same amount of sales. Because there’s so much savings on the sidelines and so much pent up demand to buy things, then their profits could stay the same, right? Theoretically. So you know, those are the things we have to see that we don’t know. And again, I wouldn’t bet against the American consumer. And I would not have bet against the American companies to be able to figure out how to do this. But if they don’t, we’ll see it, we’ll see it in the price. And we’ll react to that and deal with that and figure out which companies can do better than others, you know, in a in that type of environment. But it’s a good question.
Easan Arulanantham:
Where do you feel like wage growth kind of plays into inflation because I know wages are very key component of it.
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, wage growth is more permanent to me. You know, if you go from $7 an hour that you’re paying everybody to $10 an hour, and then the labor market picks back up and people start applying again, you’re probably not cutting everybody back down to $7 an hour. And so you know, that’s, that’s, that’s where the more permanent portion of inflation plays a role. And long term, it’s the one thing that seems to bother the economists and the different stock market, you know, people the most is this concept of a tight labor market, which ironically, we have now, even though we have, you know, lots and lots of people unemployed, and lots of job openings, we still don’t have many people actually taking these jobs. And so it is an issue, I think it’s probably the biggest issue of all the different things and maybe one of the hardest to actually answer. in long term, we’ll answer it through automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, I’m telling you, these companies aren’t going to sit there for the next 10 years and just hope for people to come out to work, they’ll find ways to make their products.
You know, because as wage raises, it just brings in, you know, like one of the things we saw here in California, you know, when they went to a higher minimum wage, is all of a sudden you start to see more of these kiosks, like you go into McDonald’s and you order on a kiosk, they took those all out after the pandemic, because nobody wanted to touch anything, but that’s, you know, that type of stuff. But the idea was that if you know for that much money, hey, we can get this kiosk, which is more expensive than paying somebody cheaper minimum wage. And so there is some replacement that’s going to happen here as far as that goes. That you know, will will be an issue. I don’t know that that’s a good thing, honestly, because people need to work, but it seems to be a trend that’s going to happen, you know, factories are becoming more automated. And I think that’s going to continue. You know, we saw a lot of big outbreaks in these meatpacking plants in the Midwest, for example. I betcha there’s a lot more automation that comes into those places, you know, as we go forward here, so it’s it wages a big issue. Well, you know, we’ll have to see how it actually plays out.