Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Tuesday. The S&P 500 took a small break today from setting new records. It was down .13%, and it really was a great August altogether. A little over 3% rate of return on the S&P for August; which is pretty good for what is usually a slow month. I talked at the beginning of the month that maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, because there probably aren’t as many people going on vacations and different things, that would happen in a normal August. We probably felt at one point in time that the summer would be more active, then the Delta Variant came and some people probably hung back some; I know I did.
So that, allows people to sort of focus on the market, and we saw plenty of money coming in, and maybe not as many money managers were on vacation either. So we’ll see how that plays out, be interesting see what happens going forward. And really, maybe what happens next summer, if we get back to normal again. But last summer was very good: July and August, very good. Again, this summer: Very good. And so it’s really interesting, as far as that goes.
The big thing that’s coming up, and this is going to be fairly important, is the jobs report that’s going to come out on Friday. So the expectation is that it’ll be around 750,000 new jobs. If you remember from last month, it was about 935,000 jobs altogether. And so there is some feeling, at least in my part, that if we kind of get back into that 850 to a million new jobs, you’re gonna see the Federal Reserve start to become a little bit more aggressive in their speaking, about cutting back on these bond purchases that they’re doing.
Their main objective is employment, and they’re really looking at that. It’s interesting, because that’s not something they talked about, as much as they do now. They usually just talked about inflation and trying to keep inflation down and what have you, but now they’re talking about this kind of full employment, or at least what they call “Substantial Progress” towards full employment. And I think if we do get into that higher range, we probably will see more information coming out from the Federal Reserve that they might be cutting back sooner.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I actually think this whole thing about the cutting back on bonds, which is a big deal, won’t be as big a deal as it was in the past, just because they have done a much better job communicating what’s been happening. So I don’t suspect that that’s going to cause all kinds of problems. You can always have volatility, the market; you can have small downturns or what have you. But I tell you what, every time we get small downturns right now, you get people coming in and buying the dip. So it’s really amazingly supportive market altogether, as far as where it might go. So let’s wait and see what’s going to happen tomorrow. Definitely an interesting time to be watching what’s going on with the market. So talk to you then. Thank you very much.