Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Here’s the S&P 500, so far year to date, and what we have here is a breakdown of, you know, the market. Overall, we can see that it’s been coming down, you know, since the beginning of the year, it actually hit the all time high there on the third of January, the 200, day moving averages that blue line, so we’re below the 200, day moving average, the 200, day moving average is moving down. To me, that means the major motion of the market is down at this point in time and the minor moves are up. And so you can see that we’ve had many little upturns here, all of which have failed in the end and came back down. And so until we kind of reestablished the new major trend to the upside, it’s time to be cautious. As far as I’m concerned. We did hit a low back here in June, maybe that’s the all time well, you know, we’ll have to see what happens. But you have to be a little bit cautious here, assuming that that’s true, and not jumping back into these motions that are happening. We have seen this week, essentially, you know, for days down and today’s up. And we’ll talk about why here in a moment. But overall, over the last two weeks, if you look at that we’re kind of just going sideways, right?
We’re just kind of churning through time here, kind of waiting to see what directions we’re going to take. And essentially it means there’s an equilibrium between, you know, the sellers and the buyers. And there’s different reasons that you know, people would have for that. But here’s, here’s what we’re having happened so far this week that I’ll share with you that I think is interesting. So first of all, this is the year over year consumer price index number. And what this represents, theoretically, is the inflation on the things that we buy it, you know, personally, inflation is really a personal thing depends on what you’re purchasing all together as to what you really end up experiencing. But we see here that it’s up 9.1%, which goes, you know, back to the 1980s, early 1980s, since you’ve seen anything like this. So obviously inflation is very, very high, it is the major issue that’s happening with the stock market. And this number was reported on Wednesday. So this is a big number that people wait for to see what’s going to happen. And it’s it’s the other thing we look at here is that, you know, basically in March that we’re at the all time high for this year, and then you know, of course it dropped a little Okay, that looks good, but then it went up in May 8.6%. Now, it’s kind of up in June.
Now we’re again talking about, okay, maybe this is the high for the for this time period, things are gonna fall. And there’s some reasons that people are talking about the fact that this could be the high as far as that goes. And one of which is the fact that what they call core inflation, which is just the headline inflation, which we just looked at minus food and energy, core inflation is down again, it was down in April, down to May, down in June, still very high actually a 5.9%. That’s really go again, back to the 80s, since you’ve seen core inflation that high, but the direction is to the downside. So the what the Federal Reserve is doing is starting to work, they’re starting to be some pull back in terms of you know, the cost of some of these areas, we’re seeing wage inflation, which is probably the most difficult to get rid of not really going that fast. In other words, wages grew at about 6% a year at one point here during this pandemic recovery. And that’s down to about 4%. Now, and so that’s a good thing in terms of the possibility of the Federal Reserve being able to kind of back off, but that core inflation is a big issue.
And so really, if if core inflation is coming down, and headline inflation is going up, that means food and energy are the big driver. And specifically, we look at gas here and you can look at diesel, you can look at natural gas, oil, you know all of these things that fit into that category. But gas peaked out in the middle of June. And so when we look at the CPI headline inflation, including food and energy, it was up a lot for June. But it’s sort of a backward looking, you know, index as far as that goes. Right now we see that gas has come back down. However, I would caution you because if you look back on that chart just a little bit, you can see that it peaked out in March came down and then went higher. So just because it’s coming down right now doesn’t mean it’s going to stay down or go all the way back down. And we’re going to have some reasonable price for gas. And I do think this is one of the key things to watch. Again, the direction like core inflation is the right way right now, which is good. But you know what actually happens here as far as that goes. So I feel that this is the biggest threat right now to what could happen to the stock market. And that’s specifically because of the Russia Ukraine situation.
So you have a scenario where JP Morgan has done a study and they He looked at the possibility of Russia kind of weaponizing oil. So if they cut back $3 million, 3 million barrels a month, the projection was that oil will go to $190. Well, it’s at 97. Now. And so that would make, you know, essentially gas, nearly double in potential, you know, motion, which would be dramatic, to the economy to everybody’s pocketbooks. They also said, you know, again, 11 million is what they’re producing, if they cut that back by 5 million, that oil prices could go to $380 a barrel, again, imagine gas costing four times much. Not saying that gas and oil are directly related, but they’re very heavily related. So that’s the biggest threat, if you had a situation of $7 $10 $20, gas, whatever that might be diesel, all these things, because everything takes energy to be produced and to be delivered and shipped around the world and brought to your store or to your door, whatever it might be. And so when energy prices go up, it just sucks money out of the economy, the energy producers make money, but everybody else is making less, and everybody else has less to spend on other things. You know, maybe if your gas costs are so high, you stopped going to restaurants as much or going out to movies, or going on a trip because you really can’t afford it. Because you’re spending so much money on you know, warming up your house or cooling off your house or whatever it might be happening. So that’s the big threat that we have to watch for. You’ll see it here in this gas price, probably very quickly. Certainly watch the oil price. And we’re already seeing some of these threats happening, where the Russia has started to cut back on some of the gas, natural gas production deliveries and what have you to so we’ll see how that plays out.
The market is up today. This is one of the big reasons that it’s up today, the consumer spending number came out. And the retail and food services sales versus last month are up 1%, which is a really pretty good move altogether. And so this is kind of fascinating, because what’s happening is essentially, if you look at the Consumer Sentiment surveys, the basic answer to the survey is my financial situation looks bleak. I am very concerned about what might be happening six months from now. Yet they’re going out and spending money anyway, right? Because the pocket book is kind of more important to me than the surveys, although the surveys are part of most of these leading indexes have a consumer survey in them, because they have proven to be a good forecasting tool. So we’ll see what happens. But there’s a lot of pent up demand, right? I mean, people want to go do things they want to go to restaurants want to go to movies, they want to go out to eat, go go travel. And so, you know, at the beginning of the year had quite a bit of cash in the households and in the businesses. And some of that has been dissipated now. And we’re starting to see reports that credit usage of whether it’s car loans or credit cards or those types of things is going up on a household basis. And so people are just going for it, they’re going out there, I don’t see that stopping. But here’s the problem with that the Federal Reserve is trying to bring down inflation. If we keep going out and spending and spending and spending that’s going to fight with the Federal Reserve is going to do, the Feds is going to push even harder and keep raising rates and raising rates. And then all of a sudden, we might stop spending.
And so we can stop spending a lot very quickly if we wanted to right, and the impact of what the Federal Reserve so that they’re supposed to maybe raise rates this month by three quarters of a percent, right, that won’t have an impact for six months. So then come around September for the next meeting, maybe they raised another half percent, that doesn’t have an impact for six months. But in between time the consumer can start to pull back. And that’s how you get these bigger recessions because there’s this big lag for what happens with the Federal Reserve. But people can stop spending pretty quickly, right? So this is an important number to watch. Two thirds of the economy is driven by consumer spending. So that’s super important. But it’s ironically, a weird, contrary indicator right now to have consumer spending going up in an environment where you already have high inflation. So sometimes good news can be bad news. But today, it’s good news. Apparently, if we look at the stock market, it jumped on this number, and it’s doing quite well. The markets still in this little range. So honestly, in my own personal opinion doesn’t really matter what it does until it moves above that range, or below that range. So you can attach all kinds of reasons for why things happen. But anyway, this, this is what’s been going on.
I do think this is a very fascinating, you know, timeframe in terms of looking at what’s going on with the markets as a whole and So I look forward to being able to talk to you again next week.