Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was down a little bit over point 8%. Today actually was up as much as 1%. Really early in the morning, and then kind of held in there. But the news that seemed to drive it down the most was the fact that Apple announced that they’re going to cut back on hiring, starting in 2023. You know, so this has some concerns about the job market issues that could lead to recession. Sometimes you have to wonder if you know, you don’t get into recession, because so many things, people are thinking about a recession, you know, you get companies start looking at and say, hey, you know, we better be careful, because there might be a recession coming. Now, they’re not just doing this, you know, because other people are saying it, if you look at what’s going on with the leading indicators, I think a lot of companies are looking at this and saying, hey, you know, the two year treasuries higher than the 10 year Treasury, and the three month Treasury is pretty close. And the other leading economic indicators are eroding. So maybe this is a time to be more cautious with our forward looking outlook. Course, that can be a self perpetuating cycle where, you know, we started to see some downturn because of that. So we’ll see how that plays out.
I think the other thing that factored in today was certainly the situation with the natural gas deliveries from Russia, they have decided to cut back on a couple of different companies essentially, citing a thing called force majeure, which is just essentially, a contractual scenario where you can try to move out of that contract because of situations out of your control. Obviously, they look at this situation with Russia, Ukraine, sanctions and those things as being out of their control. So this is probably my biggest fear is what’s going to happen with natural gas, coal and oil coming out of Russia. Do they continue to start to pull back? The Nord one pipeline, which is the big pipeline delivers natural gas to Europe is down for maintenance, it was already scheduled, supposed to reopen this week. But there’s some fears as to whether it will reopen and such too. So, you know, Europe has some reserves of natural gas. But if that doesn’t reopen, that could cause a real problem. So these are things we’ll be watching for here. You know, it’s kind of interesting to me, if we didn’t have the situation in Russia, I think we’re good. I think this markets doing well, inflation is coming down. The Federal Reserve, as you know, can be less hawkish. It really is that situation there that’s causing a lot of the problems that we’re reacting to at this point in time. We did see the price of oil jump up a fair amount today, just because Saudi Arabia said that they weren’t going to, you know, rush out with new oil, essentially, they were going to go through the process, or that they go with OPEC plus and such too. So you know, different factors that are going on. A lot of it has to do with the same things. But nonetheless, I look forward to see what’s going to happen tomorrow. Thank you very much.