Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Wednesday, the S&P 500 was down point one 5%. Today, it was up more over 2%. And then the Federal Reserve Chairman came out and started answering questions. And it’s the stock market slowly eroded back down. And we ended up in a negative to a small degree. And one of the things they think that you have to understand from a bottom line standpoint about what’s happening here, Federal Reserve has two mandates. One is trying to create full employment, they feel like they’ve done that. The second is to fight inflation. And that’s what they’re working on now. But it’s a very tricky situation, because of the situation we’re in with the pandemic and the reopening and all these different things, I’m going to give you a short list of things that can bring down inflation without the Federal Reserve number one, the stock market coming down, I’ve had a lot of clients call and ask about maybe cutting back on some of their, you know, withdrawals because the markets down. So when the market comes down, people feel less wealthy, when rates go up, like they have been even without the fair reserve doing anything on mortgages, eventually, that’ll end up hitting housing costs, you know, prices. And so eventually, we might see some, you know, deterioration there, which is another thing that makes people feel, you know, a little bit less wealthy. As far as that goes, the supply chain issues are expected to get better here in the second half of the year, might be one of the major contributors to inflation so far, so that would be a big one, if it starts to come down. rising wages have been an issue, because we have this tight labor market that could moderate itself here, as people get more comfortable, if they come out, you know, assuming we don’t have, you know, more variants coming, that create more problems, more variance, creating more problems, could also bring down inflation to a certain degree, just because you’re getting less mobility, people moving around less, not spending as much on travel and those types of things. And so, you know, it’s just pretty, pretty big list, I would throw in, I guess, the fiscal stimulus that came out last year, kind of burning off, not expecting new fiscal stimulus this year.
So there’s a whole bunch of things that are lined up already to bring inflation down throughout this year, my expectations would be if those do transpire, that would more be a second half of the year where inflation would come down. And, you know, the Federal Reserve raising rates, this is the big question, I think, do they overdo it? It’s very tricky situation, try to figure out the term Chairman Powell was very adamant about flexibility and trying to read the data, and what have you. And so hopefully, they’ll do it correctly. But I think that will be one of the concerns that they bring in some, you know, higher interest rates, and then also lower their balance sheets. At the same time, all of these other things start to bring down inflation, and you could actually go the other way and end up in recession. And that’s what the market is kind of, you know, sitting on here and try to figure out what’s happening. So I suspect the Federal Reserve will do okay here, but it is a tough situation. Obviously, it’s not something that they’re normally dealing with. We don’t have pandemics very often so. But that’s what happened today. earnings were fantastic. I think that got buried. Microsoft had great earnings last night, beat X, you know, expectations. They’re up 22%, which is great for big company, the stock was up 2.9% Today, and then tonight, Intel reported beyond expectations. Tesla reported beyond expectations 88% of companies that have reported so far beat expectations. So I think earnings are going to be there, we could have a really good environment by the end of the year, if earnings can continue to do well. And inflation does moderate in some form or fashion, you could end up with a good situation. So what we’re doing so far in rebalancing is working great. We bought Microsoft at a really low level. We bought semiconductors several times at low levels here. semiconductors are up today a fair amount also even though the market was down so I think you know the earnings are going to drive some of these things right now because they’re they’re coming out as we speak, and they’re they’re quite good. So that’s good. So look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow. Thank you very much.