Transcript:
Easan Arulantham:
So what kind of contain possible contagion events do you see in the future?
Tom Vaughan:
Contagion events just means that something happened somewhere that creates problems for you. In the end, in 2008, the contagion was these credit default swaps as they were called. Lehman Brothers was failing. There were a lot of problems happening. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury were meeting with Lehman Brothers are looking at $150 billion bailout, they decided against it, Lehman Brothers had to fold up and close shop, but it created this whole contagion event of the House of Cards broke down, and the mortgage bonds that these these credit default swaps are an insurance policy that will pay off if your mortgage Bond dropped. They had to pay off. So they had to sell everything. So that’s what contagious about I mean, so they’re selling your stocks, your money becomes somebody source of funds. That’s, that’s the issue. So the thing about contagions, the real ones that matter that are really, really bad. You don’t know what they are. That’s the whole point.
So the Federal Reserve, I’ll never forget, Federal Reserve and the Treasury Secretary being interviewed talking about Lehman Brothers, they had no idea how big the credit default swap market was. By letting Lehman go would just create this cascade, they saved 150 billion, by not bailing out Lehman, I think they spent about 7 trillion bailing out the economy, maybe they would have done it anyway. But that’s the problem, it’s hard to see those, there’s some very obvious ones that we see, number one is, to me is China. And they’re lowering interest rates. Everybody else, including the European Union, is raising interest rates, which is very rare for them, they’ve had negative interest rates for quite a while they raised rates, three quarters of a percent, and China’s lowering rates, because of their zero COVID lock downs and some of the other things that are happening there, they build that kind of empire on a lot of real estate debt. And so it’s getting really creaky. If that implodes, it would it would affect everything, I mean, you could have, in our case, we have basically almost no exposure to Chinese stocks, it won’t matter, somebody’s going to have exposure, they’re going to need to sell the stocks that you own bonds that you own in order to do that. The other most obvious one is the, situation in Ukraine, specifically having to do with, price of oil, price of natural gas, and the price of coal, all of which are coming from Russia, into Europe.
We’re going to potentially have an energy crisis, especially this winter. So Nord one, which is a pipeline from Russia, they kept turning it off, turn it back on reducing the amount, they’ve now turned it off. And they’ve said, basically, until you take away the sanctions, we’re just gonna leave it off. You’ve got countries like, Germany, getting half of their natural gas from Russia. In the winter, there’s going to be more demands. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that, I would bet that even if those happen, they’re not the big, big, big downturns that people are thinking, because they’re so obvious. The one thing I’ll say here that that is a little bit different, but the Federal Reserve over raising rates is an issue. But more than that, it’s just this entire arena that we’re in, what happens is, when things start to have trouble the whole raising of rates puts pressure, the stock market falling puts pressure on everything, on companies on countries, and the bond market falling all of these things put pressure, and Greenspan had this famous saying, basically, when the tide goes out, you can see who’s swimming naked. What’s happening right now is the tide is going out. And that pressure is getting higher. So it creates the potential for something to happen. Maybe it’s a third world country or emerging market that defaults on its debt, right? Because the debt is denominated in US dollars, which has been getting stronger, and they’re having to take their currency and basically their payments are going up, right, the cost of payments because they’re having to get dollars.
I think, overall, what I would be focusing on here and the reason that we have 18% of our stock market exposure out of the market, is because Because the potential is higher right now, there’s just there’s just no way around that there’s an inverted yield curve, there’s a leading indicators are down for five months, those types of things. I think there’s some great things happening. That we could end up with a really good market here. Most of these big market downturns and recoveries came out of just bad news. March of 2009 was dark, it was the bottom. Right? Nobody thought that at the time, so you always got to keep that in mind. That’s why we keep some exposure here. But that’s, that’s kind of what’s happening. Obviously, China and Ukraine are the two biggies. But it’s more of the pressure that’s being applied to the system right now. Those companies that are over leveraged, or countries that are over leveraged, or what have you that that’s where we could see some problems. So we’ll have to see how this plays out. It’s going to be very fascinating.
You’re definitely going to see as the market keeps coming down, or if it keeps coming down, more more like Ponzi or scams that are falling apart, because they just can’t pay out anymore.
Oh, yeah, they just had the 190 $6 million, one in Florida. With the lady they called her the Mother Teresa of small business. Because she had this scheme, her and another gentleman had the scheme where they were gathering money from investors over 15,000 investors, by the way, which is a lot more than we have, which is amazing, these scams get so many people involved, it’s just incredible, of course paying out these elaborate rates of return because what they claimed was they were lending money to businesses, and so they’re gonna get these huge returns. They’re returning part of that, of course, in a Ponzi scheme, they don’t have any of that. They’re just taking your money, paying some of it back to you as payments. Essentially, then taking out the rest to spend on their lifestyle works fine, as long as they can get new money coming in. What we have here in 2008, we had tons of these Ponzi schemes uncovered all and watch, you’re gonna see a lot more coming up.
So that’s probably not a big deal in terms of the overall economy in terms of the accounts that we have are the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index isn’t probably, but it’ll just be interesting. But it’s an example of that pressure that comes Bernie Madoff was discovered in 2008. Because the Jets, owner of the Jets, ran into financial difficulties, again, under pressure, and asked for a big chunk of their money back and he turned himself in because it wasn’t there. Right. So that’s the type of thing it’s a little bit of an extreme example, but that’s the type of thing that we have to watch out for here in this environment is just, again, things are under pressure. The more they raise rates, the more that pressure grows. We just got to see what comes out of that, if anything.