Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was down point two 4%. Today, obviously, the big financial news was the sanctions on Russia and how they might impact our stock markets. I want to talk about that some. And we really had this crazy scenario where the ruble was falling, the central bank there in Russia has $630 billion set aside to try to, you know, support the ruble, they kept them in dollars, the US Treasury froze that money, so they couldn’t support it. Ruble falls to a penny, Russian stock market closes, the central bank there in Russia raises their interest rates to 20%, which is an amazing number. We’ve been arguing and worrying about our central bank raising rates between a quarter and a half percent in March. And they just went to 20%. Today. And so you know, what does that mean for their ability to pay their Treasury debt, and all of these different things that are going on there. So, you know, impact wise from this particular conflict, you know, the first thought process was that energy was going to be a problem, because we’re going to see a skyrocketing oil price. And then that’s going to create more inflation create more situation when the Federal Reserve had to get more aggressive, trying to slow that down. So far, we haven’t seen as much motion in the oil price as people thought.
And I actually think that overall, I think a lot of other countries can step up and up their production, I don’t think that’s going to be the big problem here. As far as all of the other financial situations that Russia itself is dealing with, because of these sanctions, there will be some blowback to some of these places in Europe and what have you. But if you look at our stock market, and can’t tell what’s going on, and when we had a big run up on Thursday, a big run up on Friday today, in the markets down a little bit, but the NASDAQ was up the Russell 2000 was up. And so obviously the market is you know, watch the price and you kind of get an idea. The markets not too super concerned, I think the only thing we really have to watch out for going forward here is that some hedge fund doesn’t blow up. I remember back in 1998, long-term credit capital, which was a hedge fund, had highly leveraged Russian debt. And then Russia defaulted on their whole their Treasury debt, which was not expected. And they ended up with all kinds of trouble and had to be bailed out got to be kind of a hairy situation. And so you never know what’s happening with some of these hedge funds. I’d say the one difference here is that they’ve been running around telling us that we’re going to have this invasion for a couple of weeks now.
So hopefully, these hedge funds had a chance, you know, it wasn’t an overnight thing per se, had a chance to go out and kind of unwind some of the problems that they might have, as far as that goes. So I think things are okay, as far as that goes, there may be some, you know, benefit to us here, especially in the growth stock arena. And that’s why we’re seeing the NASDAQ up today. And that’s because maybe they’ll have less rate increases, we were at a half percent almost guarantee rate increase in March. And that’s now looking more like a quarter percent, which again, is better for the growth type stocks, the tech stocks, the smaller cap stocks, those types of things. So really, again, this is why you stay diversified. Everybody’s marching down one path and then the path changes. And so you just got to be careful, you don’t get too narrow here in this market. That’s what I’ve been saying all year long. Get too narrow, you’re going to be possibly on the wrong path. It’s hard to tell. There’s too many crosscurrent right now, but really unbelievable time to be watching what’s going on. I do think we need to keep our eye on what might happen with hedge funds. We need to keep our eye on what’s going on with these different sanctions and see you know what type of impact they have. But so far the market is doing okay. And I think the market continues to do okay, overall here. We’ll have to see how this plays out. But look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow. Thank you very much.