Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello everybody, welcome to Tuesday. The S&P 500 was up almost 2.1% today. Really strong day, a lot of interesting things happened today. First of all, and maybe most important for me, is that they have come to a resolution, so to speak about the debt ceiling. Schumer, McConnell and Pelosi have gotten together, and they’ve created a bill that they’re going to actually be voting on in the house this evening, to allow the Senate to pass a debt ceiling increase one time, with just 51 votes. So there’s 50 senators that are in Democrat side, and then Harris could be the tiebreaker for the 51st vote, which means effectively, they can raise the debt ceiling themselves out really to any amount to any timeframe as far as that goes. And so that was the one big thing that was really tilting the negative scale, you know, for me was that that ceiling piece. We had phenomenal day today. I think that’s part of that is that, you know, resolution of this potential problem going forward.
But then also, there’s just, you know, more news about the Omicron variant, being mild. Lots of other news, if you read closely staying to be a little bit cautious about that, because we don’t know everything we need to know there quite yet. But we’re seeing, you know, some fairly good data from the people that have gotten it so far. And so the market is looking at that. And we have some different, you know, government officials, both here in South Africa, and what have you, that are talking, you know, relatively positive about it, although with some caution as far as that goes.
So, I have said before, at least as far as the variant goes, you know, the Delta Variant was a pretty effective variant spread pretty well, caused a lot of hospitalizations and deaths, and yet, it still didn’t impact the economy that greatly it did have some impact, but the stock market still did okay, in that timeframe. And so I wasn’t so sure that this particular variant was going to create a big market issue. I’m much more concerned about what the Federal Reserve is going to do here. They are meeting next week, going to be talking about what they’re doing, you know, in terms of their stimulus purchases of these bonds, and how fast they might cut back and such too.
Just on Monday, we moved out some pieces, about 20% of our stock market exposure, and we’re going to be moving those back in tomorrow morning. Just wanted to wait and make sure that this debt ceiling situation was resolved as far as that goes. So still had a great day today, even with just kind of 80% of our stock market exposure in there, we had one a phenomenal day with lots of good pieces. And again, we only made these changes in the IRA, so the trusts and the other taxable accounts weren’t affected, as far as that goes.
So that’s what’s going on really good market right now. A lot of pressure came off. A lot of you know, we have had two up days in a row, which is one of the things I always watch for. So hopefully things can start to kind of settle in here we can get back to our kind of a normal Christmas rally that we seem to get pretty much every year as far as that goes. So anyway, look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you.