Hey everyone me kevin here. It is time for your daily dose of fud. Let's get right into your daily dose of fud, which includes updates from not only the federal reserve but also multiple earnings reports. The philly fed survey we're going to break this one down.

We'll talk about what the heck is going on with btc and what happened with some interesting earnings yesterday, let's get right into it. First, let's talk about what the most hawkish member of the federal reserve, mr james bullard, had to say. Mr james ballard said that bringing inflation down to two percent may ultimately require the federal reserve overshooting interest rates well above two percent. This is kind of like the opposite of the flexible average inflation targeting that the federal reserve used to tell us about how transitory inflation would be last year when they said hey, we don't mind the fate of just letting inflation run hot for a little bit, because It'll, just average two percent in the long run well, james bullard doesn't think so he says quote if you want to put downward pressure on inflation, you'd actually have to get to neutral and then go beyond neutral.

This was at an event hosted by columbia university today in new york, and he says quote: i think, that's a major concern of mine - we're not really in a position to do that right now, but we have to get in a position to do that. So, in other words, he's kind of saying, like the economy, is not ready to support us being at two percent rates because it might be too restrictive. But we're in this position, where we kind of have to because inflation is so high. Now much of the federal reserve and many individuals believe that at some point once supply chains improve things will just get better, but he argues that he does not see inflation dissipating anytime soon.

In fact he says quote: we have to manage the risk that inflation does not dissipate, as some people might hope and after all he says the market is quote, losing faith to some degree that inflation is going to dissipate in any amount of reasonable time. Now there are two things: are really driving inflation. Obviously, the big one supply chains leading to substantially higher input costs for corporations, but it's not just supply chains and even commodity costs, which are through the freaking roof for raw material costs. It's also the fact that wages are going up substantially, especially amongst those earning less than a hundred thousand dollars.

We're seeing substantial wage increases to the point where even apple just last week announced a pretty rare, across-the-board wage hike for all of the employees, not in their engineering departments or their higher paid tech departments, but in their retail stores, where the genius bar workers are and The sales associates work, and so this is potentially creating we're, not confident yet that it has, but it's potentially leading to fears that we will face a wage price spiral. Wage price spiral, wages go up that leads costs for businesses to go up. Businesses want to preserve margins, so they raise prices, but then because prices are higher, wage earners again demand more wages and you keep moving so on and so forth. So far, the only person that i've really seen who's like in the whole economic space and i'm sure there are many more out there, but one who's relatively prominent - is the director of the university of miss michigan university of michigan consumer confidence index, my goodness uh.

This is that report that we got that showed that consumer confidence had actually fallen, that individuals were becoming less confident and that they actually expected inflation to be lower in about a year's time frame right, which was which is good signs, because it's like oh great, maybe If consumers chill out and they stop spending as much, maybe inflation will go away, but the problem is the director literally of that survey, told us yeah we're seeing a decoupling of inflationary concerns from just supply chains and instead we're seeing them move over to the wage Price spiral side, which means even as supply chains, get better. We might not actually see inflation come down, which i thought to myself like wow. That's weird like why and then it hit me. Oh my gosh.

What did autonation tell us this morning now? I don't think autonation is going to be like every corporation in the world, but autonation is the largest car dealership chain and uh to me. I don't know about you, okay, but to me this just sounds pretty much like straight up corporate greed. But again i want to hear it from you. They say: discounts at car dealerships may be a thing of the past, which i mean initially hear that and i'm like.

Okay, yeah jcpenney tried the whole no coupon thing in everyday low prices, and we saw what happened with jcpenney anyway. According to bloomberg, autonation suggests that tighter inventories have persisted, even as vehicle production has ramped up and now argues that there's no reason to return to excessively high inventory levels on lots ever because all that does is end up depressing new vehicle margins, and they also suggest That significant discounting ends up damaging their brands and so now they're trying to do everything to keep their prices high get this folks - and this is this - is just nasty ugly and disgusting. Gm and ford are thinking about purposefully, limiting production, even as chip shortages ease, so that way they can continue to maintain higher prices. Car dealers are also more often than they have ever before in the past, are charging above sticker price.

We'll give you statistics after this anecdote, went to a car dealership, went to a toyota dealership, and you see a normal prius that usually retails for about thirty five thousand dollars on sticker had a byline under it. That's a ten thousand dollar dealer premium. Basically, because the dealer has so few cars they're, just like we're just going to charge an extra ten thousand dollars, because we can now jim farley, the ceo of ford said that at ford this was only common in about 10 of dealers and suggested that this was Unacceptable but acknowledged it was happening, but when we actually look at the data, we see that in 2021 percent of cars sold above their sticker price. So two percent of all cars sold above their sticker price.

Last month, though, in january for all the people in the uh inflationist transitory camp 80 of cars - 80. that's 40 times as many were sold above sticker, that's absolutely insane, but anyway, so uh look. You've got bullard, obviously sending up this massive fear flag. In addition to what's happening in russia, which we'll talk about in just a moment, and then of course, you have doves who say things like: no: no, no we're not going to do emergency hikes.

We're not going to go aggressive here, because that could shock markets and when i say shock markets, they're generally not worried about stock prices. Trending down that actually de-risks things they're worried about sudden circuit breaker style drops where all of a sudden banks are like. Okay, stop lending right when you freak out banks, you stall lending, you cancel mortgages, you shock the workings of the economy and that can lead you to a depression. He says nah that won't be a problem.

We need to regain credibility. Let's get to one percent interest by july 1st: he moved that back by the way he first said june 1st, like a week ago and now he's saying july 1st, but whatever let's get to one percent as soon as possible, get back the credibility we need because Right now we don't have any credibility. Left is what mr ballard says: either way. Look the minutes yesterday from the federal reserve.

They didn't give us any extremely hawkish clues, but we're starting, i mean nothing more than what we heard in december, so it was like no news yesterday right, but we're certainly seeing this massive divergence between people like bullard, who are like. Ah stocks, will be fine. Don't worry about it, markets will be fine, let's just hike. Of course, he's got to say that to sell his pitch right to sell his argument.

Uh and mary daley is like no. No, no, no, no, we got ta be careful. We can be careful, we don't. We don't want to go into a depression by tightening too soon.

Besides, inflation is transitory, and so you really got to evaluate yourself what the heck you're going to do with your portfolio right. Obviously, you have two choices. You could just keep buying the freaking dip, which i i bought a little bit of the dip this morning and i feel responsible for crashing the market. But i don't feel responsible for calling the uh wedge breakout that we saw on gold when i bought over seven figures of gold just a week ago and now we're seeing that wedge breakout.

The gold miners are doing better than gold itself. But i mean look at like barrick gold, for example. They are absolutely killing it uh and we're just now getting a uh, an update here that russian forces are moving closer to ukraine's border, say uk sources and the guardian. It's not good, which we're going to talk about russia in just a moment, but quick mention then we're going to talk about russia.

Then we're going to talk about the philly fed that this video is brought to you by titan. And of course, if you want any of my buy, sell alerts check out both the links for titan and my programs on building your wealth in the link down below. But let's listen to a sponsorship message from titan. It takes a lot of time to keep up with everything in the stock market, and sometimes, quite frankly, you even lose a sleep over it.

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Now we need to talk about russia blinking, and this is probably what's really weighing on markets today, secretary of state blink and is set to meet with russian counterparts. Sergey lavrov next week as biden, warns that the possibility of an invasion is very high. We were initially told that russia was going to start withdrawing at troops from the border around ukraine, as some exercises had completed, but this was really just putin, saying alright to his his uh foreign ministers and uh. It's not actually.

What happened it actually looked like troops were sending more blood supplies to the border that potentially, as many as 7 000, more troops were moved to the border, and now reuters is reporting and posting images of apparently shells that have hit buildings in ukraine, including a kindergarten. Thankfully, it didn't appear that anyone was hurt. Monitoring agencies, though, in eastern europe, have cited numerous ceasefire violations on both sides, and this is raising concerns that essentially, this could be the perfect setup for false flag operations that that russia then uses to invade big problem and the market's probably heavily reacting to this. Now.

Next, we got to talk about the philly fed and what happened this morning with the philly fed, but it's also worth just quickly noting that treasuries are declining right. Now we got the 10-year about 1.97. This is actually helping steepen the yield curve, which is usually a sign that a recession is less likely to come, but this could be thrown off kilter because people are also fleeing stocks to the safety of bonds. And when you flee to the safety of bonds, you can screw up the yield curve, so the yield curve has been just a disaster.

On one side you got the federal reserve and its ridiculousness and and the way they manipulate markets uh and then, of course, now you have this fear play going on as well. Uh now uh, so treasury's going down to some degree, makes sense what we're seeing with the yield curves to some degree make sense. It doesn't quite make sense that, as fears are rising about an invasion you're actually seeing oil go down two percent, but i'm just gon na say for these two things whatever like. Sometimes you just don't have an answer as to why the market does things.

I will say, though we do have a little bit of a conversation to have about bitcoin, and then we got to talk about the philly fed because the philly fed this. This was interesting from this morning and then we're going to get to some earnings. Okay. So, first of all, bitcoin, of course we're going to jump over to ftx, which, if you have not yet signed up for ftx, to get your free 10 make sure to do that.

But we did have btc break below our 2k support, which is not ideal. We want to see btc above 2k. Honestly bitcoin has been doing quite well relative to stocks uh. Just this.

The last honestly six weeks here btc has been performing much better, that is losing less money than a lot of different stocks. So it's quite interesting and of course you could cherry pick other stocks that have done well, but broadly uh btc has performed quite well here. So if you want to trade btc or any of the other cryptos make sure to check out ftx by the link in the description down below now, let's talk about the philly fed, okay, this. This is a big one here right, so the philly fed released a report on manufacturing business outlook.

This morning it was. It was quite interesting, some of the commentary that we had here so here we go the survey's current indicators for uh general activity, new orders and shipments declined from last month. So this is generally. We don't want to see a slowing right, because that creates stagflationary fears and so we're seeing some decline uh from last month's readings, but still positive.

Now, that's that's very important. We want to remain positive, and here is one of the most important sections firms continue to report increases in prices for inputs and their own goods. It's not just the input costs. It's that they're raising prices as well.

The price is paid diffusion index edged down a little bit, so we didn't have as aggressive of an inflationary pressure which could be a teeny, tiny little sign of maybe a little bit of an inflection point there in inflation, which is good. I like seeing a little three-point move from about 72 to 69.3, but folks listen to this 74 percent of firms so, like three-fourths of firms reported increases in input prices and only five percent reported declines. Now what we want to see is that number grow. We want to see to verify this as an inflection point.

We want to start seeing that maybe 65 percent of firms reported increases in input prices and 15 noted decreases right. These are the things that we want to track, so this actually has a little inkling of good news now. This good news is certainly not enough to move markets, and probably very few people are actually paying attention to it, but it's very very, very important. Now this was interesting firms expect own price increases to match inflation rates so, in other words, we're expecting prices to kind of continue to spiral up.

Unfortunately - and this was not so great - remember what we talked about regarding the wage price spiral - firms expect their employee compensation costs to rise five percent over the next four quarters. That is not not we're done. Raising uh employee costs we're seeing employee costs go up. No! No, we still expect them to go up five percent.

That is actually an increase from the last read that we had from november uh. Now we also have the expectation by firms that inflation will be around five percent over the next year uh. This is a lot higher of an expectation by firms compared to consumers. Consumers think inflation's gon na be like three and a half percent in a year from now uh, so firm's definitely expecting more uh more inflation here now, then, we also saw 38 percent of firms.

Expect growth over the next six months so you've got. You know almost four tenths, almost 40 percent of firms here - thinking oh we're going to see growth over the next six months, but look at this 10 percent think there'll be a decrease and 45 think things will just be mostly stable. So this will be something to kind of keep an eye on as well. Is it possible that we start seeing growth in the number of firms that think we might expect to decline or flattening versus continued growth? So this is from the philly fed.

Now we got to talk about some of the other earnings, but there because there's some drama here: okay, applied materials, see supply chain challenges remaining throughout the year, but that's particularly because applied materials is already sold out for the entire year, like they literally are sold out For the entire year, which is mind-blowing nvidia, absolutely crushed it, their margins fell slightly, but they did have a nice beat and their q1 guide came in at 8.1 bill versus the point or i'm sorry, the 7.3 expected so really really good. Here they did take a 1.36 billion dollar write-off on a prepayment for the arm deal. So there was a little bit of a hit to bottom line here, but otherwise absolutely killed it now. They didn't talk much about pricing pressures or about supply chain issues.

They briefly mentioned supply chain issues, as essentially things that they're still working on and that they work with regularly. But not a lot of insight here. Biggest insight, i would say from them uh - is that they noticed that uh, a substantial decline or significant weakness in crypto mining demand. That was the wording that they used now uh.

I also want to show you an example here of what advanced, auto parts said. I thought this was interesting because i've been reading a lot of these reports. I don't even want to get into wing. Stop okay wing stop had like their chicken prices, skyrocket, uh to the tune of over 29.

Their total costs were up like 17 they're, like oh, my gosh. We got to raise prices but you're, seeing this kind of madness at almost all of the earnings calls. I mean it could be o'reilly, auto parts heineken craft heinz. These are just some from from the last few days i mean, of course, i've been reading under armor ralph lauren uh.

I mean you name it crocs shopify they're, all complaining about the same things, but i want to look at advanced, auto parts, because this i thought was very, very interesting. They said here at the top section uh, so let me provide color on on what we're thinking about our pricing strategy. Three things. First of all, we've been conducting a survey among our professional customers for many years and to give you a data point from last year's survey, the top three variables.

So the top three reasons somebody would buy stuff from advanced auto parts were number one ease of doing business number. Uh. Sorry number one was availability, number two was ease of doing business right here and number three was speed. So do you have the part? How fast can i get it and how easy is it to work with you right in in the particular order that i initially read it here, and they said that all of these three factors were more important than price.

That's wild because that means the professionals are like. I don't care, give me the part. My customer will pay, don't care if the price is higher, they got more dollar hollis. Let's go give me the parts uh.

So this this was quite interesting. I also saw on the crocs earnings call that they're trying to do nfts with crocs, and i'm like the last thing i need is more crocs around anyway uh. I do briefly want to talk about uh, matterport, firm, palantir. Look.

If companies have no earnings which these companies don't you're, just going to probably keep seeing pain, i hate to say it. It was one of the reasons i sold a while ago, because you you are, you are just in uh, unfortunately, uh a regime change, a cyclical change, and this cyclical change will continue unless we hit like a soft landing and it's like. Oh okay, wow inflation actually came down and then maybe we can get more into the companies that have. I have no earnings yet, but otherwise there's no floor.

Right now i hate to say: there's no freaking floor. It sucks uh now uh. Obviously, if you want to join me in the morning course, member live streams. Where i talk in more detail - and i answer your questions and respond to exactly what you're looking for and make sure to check out, the programs on building your wealth down below a lot of new content is being added to these, especially the wealth course.

I mean they're probably going to be about 300 lectures coming out on that course. It's gon na be amazing uh. It's still in development. Can you check out, but that one's still on development? If you want something a little bit more complete the real estate investing or the stocks and psychology of money group do check those out uh.

But i want to say about matterport as well. The fact that they're coming out with a 59 axis is great to be competitive, but is honestly kind of terrible for for the uh for their margins. I mean i, you know back in 2017 when i originally wanted to invest in this company. They were selling their matterport pro 2 for, like four grand you know now, they're selling a a 59 motor that you throw on a tripod so that your camera can spin around your iphone lidar based camera.

It can basically do the uh the the work for you. If you want to sign up for this by the way you can put your email address in here and sign up for it, i don't get anything from this, not sponsored this video is brought to you by titan, but uh. I do encourage checking this out. I mean 59.

their product revenues i think, are going to go negative. Well, not only well, i mean they are already going negative. I mean, like their margins, are going to go negative on product, which is not good they're in this transition, and - and i think this is a very difficult thing for folks to remember as well, because this is the same thing i said about coinbase uh - is that When a company's in trans transition, you're gon na go through like a an sh9t period of time, okay, because what happens is if you have high product revenue or in the course of coinbase, their product would be, let's say trading, so we'll put pt. Okay, if you have high product or trading revenue in the case of matterport and coinbase, but you know that this product revenue is going to decline at the same time as your service revenue goes up.

This period of time, right here, is going to suck for the stock and we've seen that at coinbase, and i do expect that for metaport and then a firm. Unfortunately, you know if, if the odds of a recession go up, the last thing you want is is is to be here now. I love a firm, don't get me wrong. I love a firm, but i said that originally when i first bought the company i'm like this is great as long as we're in a bull market and people keep borrowing crap and spending, but uh.

You know they hold 41 of the debt that they issue. You know: that's those are bags. Man, people stop paying those those are bags anyway, uh yeah. Hopefully we find a bottom soon, but we certainly haven't found them yet, but i'm watching every every single day.

All right, my friends. Thank you so much for watching this. Please check out titan via the link down below please check out, ftx and, of course, check out my programs on building your wealth. Thank you very much and we'll see you next time in the next video goodbye.