Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
“When do we start considering the high inflation not transitory, and ‘just the new normal?'”
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah. So I think inflation is an interesting piece, right? Because it impacts us on two sides. One as a consumer, and so we really want inflation to be very, very temporary as a consumer because going to the grocery store, going to the gas pump, right, gets to be kind of painful. At the same time, we’re also investors, at least for those of us that are watching a show like this. And so, how… does that impact our investments and what do we do? Obviously, one of the keys there is to get the investments to grow at a faster rate than inflation; that would help a lot. But whether it’s transitionary or not, is going to be kind of interesting. I actually think what we’re seeing right now is going to take a while to unwind, only because the demand surge is going to be so high. One of the things that’s happening that I think is a game changer is this antiviral pill from Pfizer. And so essentially what would happen, whether you’re vaccinated or not, if you’ve got the virus they can give you this antiviral pill and via the testing that they’ve done so far, it has kept people out of the hospital 89% of the time, right? So now we’ll see what happens, that’s still going through the process to get approved, and it’s going to be distributed and what have you. If it works at that level, the pandemic’s over. It’s a game changer.
And once that confidence comes back, I’m telling you, there’s a lot of people waiting, still holding back on some of their expenditures, we’re gonna see an explosive growth there. And it just, it’s too much growth to keep up with the supply. We have supply chain problems, we have labor chain problems, those types of things. But even if we didn’t, with a demand surge like we’re having now, and like I expected we’re gonna have, we’re gonna continue to see inflation. The Federal Reserve could do some things to try to mitigate that inflation, but getting a bunch of people to not spend money on travel or whatever it is that they’re going to want to do, that’s not going to happen. They already have businesses and consumers already have the cash on hand as a group. And so they’re not really having to borrow to create this surge for the next 6, 12 months, whatever that might be. So, what the Fed has been talking about is that that would eventually dropped down second half of next year, they’re still only expecting a 3% year over year increase in inflation for 2022.
I think they could be a little bit low on that, just in the sense of this demand surge could be higher than what people feel. But it’s just part of the process. We’ve been through this before. You know, after World War Two, people came back huge demand, people wanted homes. Obviously they’re having babies with baby boom that happened then. We had a pretty good inflationary spike in that timeframe. But asset prices were doing pretty well also. And such too. So you know, you got to have your investments in the right place to offset this inflation. I think it’s more critical than ever, to make sure your portfolio is well established, so that you can fight inflation, because you can’t stop it, per se. You know, you can’t really stop driving, and not pay for the gas or stop going to the grocery store. So those things, that’s why inflation can be kind of a trap for consumers. But as an investor, you can try to offset that by finding the right thing. So I think I think it’s going to be a bit more inflation than people thought, especially when the Federal Reserve thought, and that is the big controversy right now is is the Fed behind the curve. And they might be. But it’s one of those things that we can’t contro. What you can control is your portfolio. So whether it’s transitionary, or more permanent, there are still ways to try to combat that as an investor and to help yourself, either whether you’re heading into retirement, because now your costs are getting high, or you’re already in retirement. Either one, you really want to make sure that you’ve got the right type of portfolio together to be able to combat inflation.