Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Well, hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday, the S&P 500 was up 1.06%. Today, snapping a three day losing streak, actually lots of green on the charts today. The Nasdaq was up almost 1.8%. Today, which has really been lagging behind up until us really early this week in the last few days. And as Tech has been picking back up, again, some kind of bottom fishing coming in, buying some of these growth stocks, we’ll see what happens there. I think they’re going to have some headwinds here, as inflation continues to kind of pick up and what have you. So we’ll see what happens along those lines. But we did have a good jobs report today, they didn’t initial new claims for unemployment was below 500,000. Really the lowest it’s been for a year, just kind of a continuation of this recovery that’s happening. I think the really big number will be how many new jobs are added, which we saw last time was a lot less than expected. And it had a lot to do with just people wanting to come out and work.
We are seeing, some increases in wages coming out to try to entice people to come back to work that actually seems to be working was a little bit ironic, in that there’s been this big national conversation about having a minimum wage at $15 that got defeated in the end. And I’m seeing an awful lot of stories now, where different places are offering $15 and starting to get people to come in to apply for the jobs that they want. So they might kind of take care of itself, I guess as far as that goes. So really interesting to see how things play out in the labor side we got lots of kinds of conversations about what’s happening with the supply of microchips and all those things. But really, ultimately, the main thing to focus there will be the labor how that works, how that comes back in, how expensive is it to bring that labor back, because we’re really seeing, this argument about permanent versus temporary inflation, labor would be the part that has the more chance of being a permanent inflationary force.
So it just matters about how much and whereas like, say, lumber, for example, which went up tremendously in price has now dropped 22% from its high just back in May 10. So, again, once you see these commodity type, things like lumber out there, going up that much, all of a sudden, a lot of people find lumber, and they start to at those prices, they’re willing to bring it on board and such, too. So really, we’re starting to see some of that. And I do believe a lot of what we’re seeing in the semiconductors, and lumber and all these things are all temporary, that kind of peak out, come back down. Labor will be the thing to focus on to see what happens there and how much they have to pay to get people to come back to work, essentially, to fulfill these jobs. They’re now in demand as as the economy reopens.
One other really fascinating thing. And again, I do think cryptocurrency is kind of a big piece of what’s going on out there. There’s a lot of money floating around. They announced today that the US is going to start looking at what they’re calling a digital dollar here in the summer. So again, it’s what I said yesterday, you’re gonna see these countries competing with Bitcoins and Ethereums and what have you. And I do think that’s really, really interesting to see how that might play out. I suspect that’s not a great thing for the current cryptocurrencies.
But who knows, we’ll have to see what happens. But that’s an area that I think is important. I’d be watching kind of the labor pool from an inflationary standpoint, and really watching what kind of what’s happening in this cryptocurrency arena, because there is just so much money flying around seems to be having a little bit of a correlation with the market. You know, yesterday the market opened up down, cryptocurrency was down. And then the NASDAQ especially bounced upward about the same time that cryptocurrency started to bounce upward. And then today, cryptocurrencies up today the NASDAQ’s up some more. So, that same group that’s buying cryptocurrency is also buying those, clean energy and ARK type funds. And those things do so really we’ll see how this goes as far as that goes.
But it’s, I think those are things to watch, and try to figure out and to pay attention to those particular areas. But, the underpinnings for this market doing well, this year, whether it’s the NASDAQ or the Dow or the S&P, I think it’s still there with all this money on the sidelines. Both, professional investors that have the money, people that have the money, and they’re going to spend it on the economy or they’re going to invest it, those types of things. I think both of those are very powerful. I don’t believe the Federal Reserve is going to move very far off of their, current stance of trying to let things run to get back to a full employment situation. And so that takes some of the pressure off of the market, having the Fed make their move. So, really fascinating timeframe.
Again, great things to ask about if you want to you go to Go Live with Tom which is tomorrow. We have that every Friday now at 12:15pm Pacific Time, and look forward to getting to hear from your questions or you can just watch if you don’t have any. So look forward to talking to you tomorrow on the on the update. Thank you.