Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was up point 6%. Today, which was quite an accomplishment was down for most of the day, rallied up, did great, actually, the NASDAQ was up 1.3%. A lot of good solid companies were up. This particular time of the year is when the big companies that make lots of money, the apples, Microsoft’s Google’s etc, semiconductor companies. This is when they report their earnings. And so obviously, there’s some, maybe some enthusiasm about that, we’ll have to see how that plays out. Sometimes, you know, they have great earnings, and they make a couple of minor comments that are negative about their future outlook, and the stocks won’t do well. So in the last few quarters, this has been a time where the market has done well. So we’ll see what happens this time, I think the biggest thing going on right now that we have to really pay attention to is what the Federal Reserve is trying to do. Obviously, they’re trying to fight inflation, which they need to do. And one of their tools that they’re using is obviously raising rates. Another one is to cut, you know, let some of these bonds fall off their balance sheet. But maybe the one that we’re most familiar with right now is basically just talking aggressively. This is the most aggressive, I’ve heard the Federal Reserve speaking the 36 years that I’ve been in this business, and they’re trying to talk about, you know, the market into believing that they’re going to be raising rates a lot, which they very may well do, but the markets responding as if they already did.
So the Federal Reserve and only moved interest rates up on Fed funds rate one quarter percent, yet we have mortgages that have gone all the way back to where they were 11 years ago, we have the 10 year Treasury that’s almost all the way back to where it was before the pandemic started. And so these are things that kind of slow down the economy, slow down borrowing costs, and it’s an ideal scenario for the Fed, because theoretically, then maybe they could raise rates a little bit less, in terms of, you know, what they have to do throughout the rest of this year, if they’re, if their talk can raise rates on other products, like mortgages, and slow things down. So none of this is a real big concern other than the fact that how much things do slow down. So we need things to slow down, we had an eight and a half percent inflation rate, things have to slow down, and so housings going to slow down, theoretically, because mortgage rates go up. And that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t slow down too much. Same thing with anything that we have out there. It’s just a matter of need to have some growth that slows down, but still maintains positive growth. And that’ll get us back into that zone that allows for longer term gains in the stock market. So I think we have to be patient here, we have to wait for what’s happening. Let the Federal Reserve do what they’re going to do. They seem to be purposely trying to knock down everything that they can that’s gaining and make interest rates go up with rhetoric. And that’s, that’s okay, we do need to fight inflation here and get this under control.
So I think that, you know, we just have to be patient, take some opportunities here, look for some rebalancing points and what have you, because eventually this is all going to work its way out. And the market can continue to go forward as far as that goes, if earnings continue to do well. So the big thing we’re watching for now is if they slow things down, the right amount, perfect market does great. If they slow things down too much, that’s going to be hard for the market. And we probably want to do something on a defensive basis in that particular situation. So I just have to wait and let this play out and see what happens as far as that goes. So I’ll let you know how it’s going. That’s what these are for. And I want to thank you very much for watching today and look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you