Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
So, there’s a lot of factors that we hear about in the stock market. Inflation, labor market, supply chain, interest rates. You’ve talked about each of these subjects on an individual basis. But how do you read all these inputs, and consider … in your calculation, for picking what to invest in the market essentially?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, right. I mean, all of those are important subjects. Supply chain disruptions,… if you can’t get chips, you can’t sell Ford trucks, whatever it is. And so the expectation is, you’re going to sell X amount of trucks, and then you can’t, then the stock price takes a hit, because you can’t meet the expectations. The labor, the same thing. We can’t get things moving through the pipeline. Got lots of labor shortages. Heck, even childcare, labor shortage right now is creating all kinds of problems. Because, you know, apparently, a lot of people aren’t going back to work, because they either can’t afford childcare, even find childcare, or trust childcare in terms of the virus. And so, all of these are constraints, and of course those constraints are now causing some inflation, right? Because now we’re paying more for the wages to get people to come out of the house. And we’re obviously going to pay more for semiconductor than we would have, because it just, it’s impinging our abilities to move forward, whether we’re Ford or Apple or whoever. And so that those are all headwinds that the market is running into. But here’s the short answer to that.
And this is the thing that always kind of blows me away, when you look at, go back to the 1950s and pull up a chart of the Fed Funds Rate, which I’ve done on this show several times. And you look at the big downturns that have happened: when interest rates on the Federal Funds Rates are very low, you have not seen big downturns happen. That could happen, I suppose, but they haven’t. It’s been a fairly consistent pattern that when you see rates coming up and up and up, like in the 2008 downturn, we had I think it was 21 interest rate increases before the market fell apart, or the economy fell apart, for that matter. When interest rates are as low as they are right now, and you have a Congress, and a Federal Reserve and a Treasury that are accommodative, and trying to pump the economy back up, that’s an environment where stocks are going to do well. You can probably at least to a certain degree, ignore some of those other pieces. Because the big, big picture is there’s no place else to go. I mean, it’s that simple.
And so when somebody is running around saying we’re gonna you know, the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who’s pretty consistent in his thought process that we’re facing the largest crash you know, ever. The title the headline that I saw at the beginning of October was that it was going to happen in October, right? Biggest crash ever. And you know, you write some great books, but if you look back at his thought process, he’s been saying we’re gonna have the biggest crash ever for a long time. And a clock is right twice a day, even when it’s not working. So, he’s probably gonna be right at some point and look famous, and say called the top. But if you really followed him, you missed out on a heck of a lot of gains. And so I think if you follow those basics and look at what’s happening with the interest rates, that’s a big deal. Now, they are talking about starting to raise rates. So it’s something to think about, I think that’s big. I think the debt ceiling is something to focus on, to make sure that that doesn’t become you know, an issue. There are some big, big rocks that you should focus on. And the rest is smaller, you know, pebbles, that don’t have as much impact. I mean, look, we still have supply chain shortage. We still have labor shortage. We still have inflationary issues.
We still have the Federal Reserve cutting back on bond starting next month, it looks like. We still have the possibility of rate increases on the table for the end of next year, second half of next year. The market is going fantastically great. We just hit all time high yesterday. Why? Because the basics are there. Low taxation, and low interest rates. You can’t beat that. There’s no place else to go, really, except for stocks and real estate, in my opinion. Those are the two areas that are going to make money. Now that’ll change. I will say, at least in my shows, and during my videos, I will tell you when I think things are going to change and where things are starting to get hairy. And we will always have lots of, you know, we just had a 5.9% downturn, right? We have those types of things always, even in a great market, there’s still downturns. Anywhere from 5% to 15% is fairly common, and not something to be too afraid of. But … that’s the thing. Focusing on those big pieces that really, really matter to the market. And that’s what I’ve been doing my whole career. And it’s been fairly successful as far as that goes. And yet again, I still don’t get it, how many people are out there saying everything’s gonna fall apart? Wrong again, at least in this last downturn. Eventually, things will fall apart. That’s how it works. But it’s hard to imagine that happening here when rates are this low.