Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Everybody, welcome to Thursday, the S&P 500 was up almost 1%. Today, we’re taking advantage of this motion that we’ve had to the upside this week. And today to take some of the stock market exposure we have in most of our accounts, and put it into some ultra short term bonds just as a holding place until we see what’s going to happen. A couple of reasons for this, number one, the prayer prior couple of weeks, we’ve had some really big downturns that have kind of put some damage into the market, and really created a lot of overhead resistance. So market can have a hard time getting back through that. And sometimes or incident that resistance like it did a couple of weeks ago, and then ended up falling further, you know, to a new low. So that’s one of the concerns. The other issue that we’re really looking at here is just the situation that’s happening with the pre indicators for possible recession. So the leading economic indicator, which is one of my favorite pieces, which came out on Friday, now shows three months in a row that the leading economic indicators come down. And we’ve got all kinds of different things that we’re looking at. But that’s, that’s something that always makes me want to get more defensive, just in case we do kick into a recession. Because even though we’re down 20%, you could end up down, you know, double that if we do have a pretty heavy recession coming our way.
And one of the biggest concerns, I think, for the stock market, and for myself is really what the Federal Reserve is talking about, especially most recently, you know, they normally talk about core inflation, core inflation is actually coming down. But they actually increased rates more than expected at the last meeting, because top line inflation, which includes energy and food went up. And so they’re talking a lot about trying to bring down the cost of things that they can’t really do. They’re also talking about the areas that they really are willing to go to, in order to bring down inflation, they are willing to do almost anything to do that, including kicking us into recession, we’ll see what actually happens when they get there. There’s a lot of different things that could play out here. But specifically, the cost of gas and diesel is a really big issue right now, you have three things that are slowing us down already, you know, you have gas and diesel costs, which slows down and economy as it gets more expensive all by itself. And then you’ve got the raising interest rates that the Federal Reserve’s doing, which slows down the economy. And then of course, you have this scenario where they’re taking bonds off of their balance sheet, and unwinding some of that, you know, quantitative easing that they did. And that starts this month. And then of course, that ramps up and actually gets to be quite a bit higher by September. So there’s a lot of things sitting on top of this economy, trying to slow it down.
And we’re just seeing so many numbers in the housing arena, what have you, and housing is a really big deal. You know, it the housing crisis that we had in 2008 is enough to really, you know, convince you that it has a big impact and can have a big impact. This is not specifically a financial crisis, like we had in 2008. The banks are quite healthy. Actually, this was maybe more like what we saw in 2000 2000, they were pumping liquidity into the markets and what have you into the economy in the in the case of y2k, becoming a big issue. And then as they pulled that back, we ended up with kind of popping that bubble and had a 45% drop from high to low. This is more like that, where we pushed out tons of liquidity. Obviously, that was a thing that was needed, make sure we didn’t end up in depression during the heart of the pandemic. But now we’re pulling that back. And we’re popping a lot of bubbles, you know, the Spax. And some of these companies that don’t have earnings or even revenues that have had, you know, tremendous run ups are all now becoming much more reasonably priced, as far as that goes. So we’re kind of squishing out all this excess as they pull this stuff back. So I just want to be a little bit careful here that we don’t end up participating in that full downturn. If it does happen. I think this is a good time, as you know, especially now that we’ve had this little run up to sit on the sidelines a little bit and see what’s going to happen as far as that goes. So I’ll keep you up to date as far as what we’re doing as far as that goes. But look forward to talking to you tomorrow. I’ve got my show, do my summary. I’ll give you some more details of you know what we’re doing and why 1215 to one o’clock on talk money with Tom on YouTube. Look forward to seeing you then. Thank you very much.