Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday. The S&P 500 was up almost .6%, today. It was a really great day across the board, the Dow was up almost 1%, the NASDAQ was up .7%, and the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index was up 1.3% today, so everything was in the green. It seemed like the major catalysts, if you’re kind of watching the market, had to do with the announcement where they said, “Hey, we have an infrastructure deal.” So supposedly, this is a one and a quarter trillion dollar deal, and they’ve worked out some of the basics.
There’s a group of 21 senators, kind of bipartisan group: 11 from the Republican Party, and 10 from the Democratic Party, that kind of came together with the White House to create this package, it’s not as big as the original package that they talked about that they call the American jobs plan, and we’ll see what happens, obviously, in order to get it to go through. We’re going to need 60 votes in the Senate, which we haven’t seen in a while on much of anything. But it looks like you know, there’s some acceptance on both sides for this, but we’ll see what happens.
This is kind of exciting, I know that they did stretch this out over an eight year period, so I think that helps from an inflationary standpoint. One of the fears was, you pour out that much into infrastructure in a really quick manner, you could end up with some higher inflation. Infrastructure was one of those things that it takes time to do anyway, so that it’ll stretch out, no matter what. So I think that kind of plays an appealing aspect of it.
And the other part that helped the market today, when they announced the unemployment. So, first time unemployment applications were at 411,000. It’s a little bit higher than it was it got down into, below 400,000, there. And again, that’s seen as sort of an okay thing right now. When that really shrinks down, that means maybe the labor market is going to get a lot tighter, and of course, that is one of the things that the market does worry about. Ironically, full employment can come, but the market likes to see sort of an even growth of that employment and not coming in too fast, because obviously, that could create a situation where the rate of labor jumps too much, and then that comes through into price.
That’s kind of in that Goldilocks range, and the market likes that, also. When we saw some really good moves, today from all kinds of different areas, kind of the deep value stuff did well. We also saw really the innovative technology, and some of those areas doing well too. So, pretty broad based, lots of lots of green today, which is really exciting. Good stuff, and looking forward to seeing what’s going to be happening here tomorrow. And again, we’re doing our Go Live with Tom, which we’re actually renaming right now, called Talk Money with Tom, but we’re going to do the same thing: 12:15pm on Friday’s. Q&A session, feel free to come if you’d like and throw questions in and we’ll see what happens there. But look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you.