Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was down about point 7%. Today really just kind of a continuation from what happened last week, especially on Friday. So obviously on Friday had a Jackson Hole meeting for the Federal Reserve’s and then we had this speech eight minutes long, where Chairman Powell came out and talked very aggressively about raising rates, and that the market really, you know, is ahead of itself. As far as that goes, the market responded, dropped a bunch on Friday drops on today. But the interesting thing is what they want America one of the Fed governors today even said he was happy to see that the market responded the way that it did. And that’s exactly what they want, they want the market to be coming down so that we feel like we can’t spend as much money, we feel a little bit more poor in this environment. And that would help them with their inflation fight. The problem is that the data that’s coming in that showing inflation is looking better and better, like the price of gas has been dropping, I think for about 80 days in a row. And so that’s a really big one and inflation fight. The PCE measure came out on Friday, personal consumption expenditure index, which is a measure of inflation that the Federal Reserve prefers. And both the top line and the core PCE dropped for the month of July. So far, we’re seeing sort of a peak on inflation. And now we’re seeing things come down, commodity prices are coming down, gas is coming down all these different things.
So, do you watch the data, which is showing good things, still very high inflation, but coming in the right direction? Or do you listen to the Federal Reserve who has a vested interest in trying to drive the stock market down. And I think that’s why the market did hold up some today. So we’ll have to see how this plays out. Obviously, if the Federal Reserve just really, really goes and makes mistakes and over raises rates, then you’re going to have a problem for the economy in the stock market. But when you look at the economy right now, it is already slowing down, leading economic indicators came out again showed for the fifth month in a row that the leading economic indicators have come down. Again, we need slowdown, these are actually good things in this particular high inflationary environment. But the Federal Reserve speaks the way that they do, it makes people worry that they might make a mistake here and overdue things. As far as that goes, I think I’d be a little bit surprised that the Federal Reserve would really kick things into a heavy recession, unless they really saw inflation going up a lot. We’re not seeing that at the moment.
I think that the market might hold in here, but really, when you look at what happened at the last [Fed] meeting, they actually talked in the minutes about the possibility of easing up on raising rates or making sure they didn’t over raise rates to cause too much pain. But then the market took off. And now they’re running around trying to talk about how much pain they’re gonna cause to try to bring the market back down. I don’t know that the talk that they’re doing what we call jawboning will actually work, at least for a significant period of time, because ultimately, the data is going to win out. I would follow the data in this particular case, it is getting better, until it stops getting better, you know, the market could hold up some doesn’t mean it won’t come down some doesn’t mean it’s going to take off either, because the Federal Reserve is really using this job bonding very heavily trying to drive this market down.
It will be tough for the market to take off as long as this is going. But the data isn’t as bad as is better than it was, which I think is a good thing as far as that goes across the board. You know, of course, when you see things softening and slowing down, the worry is does it stop? Does it keep going down and those types of things? And so we’ll have to see how that goes. The consumers still spending so that could soften that and stop that decline and what have you so we’ll see how this plays out. Very interesting timeframe. Look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow and I’ll talk to you then. Thank you