Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Tuesday, the S&P 500 was down point 4%. Today, today just seem like a sideways motion for the most part waiting for tomorrow’s big news, we get retail sales that come out. And but really the most important part will be the Federal Reserve, they’re gonna announce how much they’re raising the Fed funds rate, expectation was a half percent. Now a lot more talked about three quarters of a percent. That’s probably why the market has been coming down for the last few days in anticipation of a higher rate increase than was expected prior to Friday’s report on inflation. And then there’ll be a question and answer period and what have you. Just in general, one of the things that I see that I think is interesting here is number one, the market has moved down a fair amount, Thursday, Friday, now Monday and Tuesday, and kind of stretched down quite a bit. And we’re looking at the scenario where a lot of bad news that the Fed might be pushing out there is probably priced into the market. And any good news at all, for example, half a point increase instead of three quarters, or some of the wording that they say that the market sees is positive, could start a rally that happens. And the last couple times we had these Wednesday meetings, we did have rallies, I think partly because there’s so many people shorting the market, and then we get a little push upward. And all of a sudden you get all the shorts covering by buying back the stocks, which creates even more upturn. It didn’t usually last that long. But it’ll be interesting to see what happens. But there is some very interesting information, as far as I’m concerned that we’ll come ahead of tomorrow’s announcement. Number one is, you know, the Federal Reserve tends to focus on core inflation, which is inflation without food and energy.
So when we go back to Friday’s report, the overall inflation number was 8.6%. It was supposed to be 8.3%. And the market responded quite negatively to that differential, even though that’s not that much of a difference in the market, it does move around enough. And if you look at core inflation, though, taken out food and energy, it actually came down peak was in March, it came down April in May. So how does the Federal Reserve talk about this in the past, they have focused on core inflation mainly because they don’t feel like they have as much impact on food and energy. And so are they going to go up three quarters of a point, even though the thing that they look at the most has been actually coming down, producer producer price index came out today, which is another measure of inflation. And that was actually down for May. So down for April peak and march also. So there’s some interesting things that are happening here. Obviously, energy is a big one. And food is a big one and the situation happening in Ukraine is is you know, going to be a continued problem for that, you know, gas prices are gonna have a hard time coming back down, for example, if oil prices don’t come back down. And even if they do, we have a refinery problem where we’re running at kind of max capacity, even if we had more cheaper oil, you know, be hard to bring down price of gas. Of course, we’re seasonal right now, where gas prices normally go up. And they peak, you know, usually a Fourth of July weekend and such, too.
So there’s a whole bunch of pressures on inflation right now that are that are out there. You know? And can the federal reserve really bring down the price of gas by raising increase of rates by three quarters percent instead of a half percent. And these are questions that will probably be asked. And I think it’d be really interesting to see what the answers are to these. And how the Fed is looking at this, it just gives us a window into understanding where they might be going, as far as that goes. And that’s what these meetings are about is trying to figure out what the Fed might be doing in the future. They usually don’t give complete transparency in everything that they’re seeing per se, just because they try to leave the window open for changes, like we might see right here, maybe they do three quarters of a percent instead of a half, which is what they talked about last time. They do respond. And they talk about that a lot. And so the questions are always kind of funny. They’re trying to peg down Chairman Powell to exact answers for exactly what they’re going to do in the future, when you know, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do in the future. And that’s, that’s the right answer. We don’t really know, for sure how the economy is going to react. You know, the objective here, if you’re in a perfect world is to have things slow down, bring down inflation, but not so down too much. And so there are you know, it’s fascinating right now, there’s these two camps that are kind of battling it out one camp will look at that three quarter point increase for does happen and say good, because the Federal Reserve is behind. And this is exactly what we need to see. And then another group will look at it and say, well, three quarters might be too much, because we’re already seeing some slowdown in a lot of these different areas.
You know, mortgage rates are just hits 6.28%. Today was just at five and a half just a couple weeks ago. And so how does that affect housing and there’s too many things that are starting to slow down too fast, and we’re gonna get into recession pretty quickly. And so there’s this battle going on, both looking at the same thing from two exact different opposite directions. And so, you know, that’s a little bit different than what we normally see as far as I’m concerned with what’s going on in the market. So Really looking forward to tomorrow, I’d love to see what’s going to happen. See how the market is going to react as far as that goes, it won’t take much in the way of kind of soft or good news to make the market move up from this point where it’s stretched out. So we’ll see how this plays out. So, look forward to talking tomorrow. I’ll give you my impressions on kind of what I saw. And you know, what I saw, you know, that was said and give you my interpretation that So, thank you very much for listening. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Thank you