• The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report showed a slight decline year-over-year. This is an encouraging sign that inflation is easing despite recent tariff concerns.
• While the Producer Price Index (PPI) rose sharply more than expected, many companies are currently absorbing these higher costs, aided by strong productivity and profitability.
• Thanks in part to advancements in AI, corporate earnings remain resilient, which helps cushion the economy against cost pressures.
• Markets are continuing to reach new all-time highs, and the bond market is now pricing in over a 90% chance of a Fed rate cut in September.
• Historically, the Fed often follows the bond market’s lead, which adds confidence to the likelihood of rate cuts ahead.
• The U.S. national debt has surpassed $37 trillion. This is something we continue to monitor closely. While not an immediate threat, it is a long-term risk we are prepared for.
• We believe stagflation remains unlikely, but we are watching inflation trends carefully to ensure your portfolio is well-positioned.
• Our Invest and Protect Strategy is designed to react quickly if market conditions turn negative helping to reduce exposure to sudden downturns like those seen in 2008 and other past crises.
• We remain focused on both protecting your principal and seeking opportunities for growth so you can enjoy your retirement without having to worry about daily market moves.
• Even when headlines sound alarming, we look beyond the noise to focus on what truly matters for your long-term financial security.
• You can rest assured that we are continually analyzing the markets, adjusting as needed, and making decisions with your best interest at heart.
• Our goal remains the same: helping you stay healthy, wealthy, and wise so you can focus on living your second childhood without parental supervision.

Transcript:

Ken Moraif
Hello everyone, and welcome to our Market Alert video for today, which is August 15, 2025 Thank you for watching. I hope all you SCWPers out there in SCWPer nation are SCWPering your tails off. I hope you are enjoying your second childhood without parental supervision. Everything is coming up roses for you and all you clients aren’t retired yet. Our goal is to get you there. We’re going to make you a SCWPer By hook or by crook. So thanks for watching as usual. I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. Now, you may be wondering why I’m wearing just a t shirt this week, and it’s it’s on the heels of the comment that, you know, I was too formal in my attire last time, one of our viewers said that, you know, the button down shirt, the tie, you know, it’s kind of a little too formal. So I decided to go exactly the opposite way and just just be a little more casual this time. So there you go.

Jordan Roach
Thanks for telling me. Yeah, you told me to put a coat on for this.

Ken Moraif
Hey, when you’re the boss, you can tell everybody anything you want, actually, you know, I think you might, you might try this. It’s actually very casual. I feel cool, relaxed. I feel good. We’re gonna

Jordan Roach
lock that in for next week. You can do it next week. Betcha, you betcha.

Ken Moraif
All right, let’s get serious here for just a moment. Or not so big news this week. CPI, the Consumer Price Index, inflation a year, year over year, was down. That was well received by stock and bond market. PPI came in was a lot higher than expected. So we’re gonna talk about which one’s better. Which one should we think about what is going on with that, and then also, we’re starting to think that there’s a less than zero chance now of stagflation starting to kick in, and that certainly is a concern. So we talked about that. And you know, for me, the big one is, and it’s a long term thing, it’s not going to do us harm overnight, but we crossed over $37 trillion of our national debt. 37 trillion, you can’t, if you stack that up, it goes all the way to Mars. I mean, it’s like, it’s, it’s just such an unbelievable amount of money, very, very, very bad. So we’re going to talk about all of that, right? So let’s start through, okay, all right, so let’s start off with the CPI. So that’s the consumer price index, right? So it’s a basket of goods that consumers consume, and year on year, it went down slightly. And so the fear over tariffs causing inflation and inflation heating up, et cetera, et cetera, seems to be for the time being, set aside.

Jordan Roach
I mean, the way CPI works, there’s a bunch of ways to judge CPI, and I’ve heard clients say, Well, those are all fake numbers, right? I’m feeling it more. But for what the Fed looks looks at, and the CPI is a general Yeah. I mean, the good news is, you know, all the price increases that everyone’s forecast and worried about, it hadn’t flown all the way, you know, gone all the way through to the retail consumer level. It’s moderated. Now, yes, we’re up still relative to, you know, two years ago, in just absolute terms, but the rate of increase is subsiding. It’s what it looks like for now. And certainly that’s good, good news for the market that continues to be told, wait and brace it’s coming.

Ken Moraif
Yeah. And, you know, with tariffs to filter through the the talk that I’m hearing from CEOs is that they’re absorbing the cost of the tariffs for now. But how long will they be able to do that for is the outstanding question right now. But for the time being, inflation seems to be going down for the most part. I

Jordan Roach
mean, I think some of the good news here is, I think, because of AI, largely, the productivity and profitability of firms is very, very high, and so they do have a little bit of ability to absorb some of that increase in cost, which seems what they’re doing now. How long they can do that until it eats into profits enough to where now the stock market has to reprice? We don’t know, but so far, it’s okay.

Ken Moraif
So you know, as we said over the last several weeks, you know, the news, we think is going to continue to be decent anyway, and we should see new all time highs. And sure enough, we’re seeing that. So now all eyes are pointing to the Fed next month, and are they going to lower interest rates? And it almost feels right now, you know, I always look at the Fed as kind of, you know, if you go back to old England, you know, and they had the dog hunt, you know, where they go out on the with their dogs and their horses and all that. And there’s the lead dog. Well, the lead dog isn’t the leader of the pack of dogs. What the lead dog does, the pack of dogs turns this way, and the lead dog runs over and gets in front of them. And then when the pack turns this way, the lead dog runs over and gets in front of so I think the Fed is kind of like that. You know, the bond market is all is done. And if the bond market is saying we’re going this way, the Fed is like, okay, and they get in front of it, and we’re the leaders, but they’re not the bond market is telling them what to do,

Jordan Roach
yeah, and the bond market right now, I mean, we can get ourselves in a little bit of trouble when they start doing this with the bond market right now is pricing over a 90% chance. We cut, we’re cutting in September. So, I mean, that’s pretty much almost a guarantee,

Ken Moraif
right? Except for ppi, except for ppi, the Producer Price Index came out yesterday.

Jordan Roach
Boom, that’s right. And that way to judge, you know, effectively, the cost that that businesses have for raw goods to turn it into retail goods that we consume, and that’s ticking up a

Ken Moraif
little bit. Ticked up a lot. It was supposed to be point two is point nine. So that’s,

Jordan Roach
that’s a big increase. So is that a one time deal? Is that going to be and how much is the market already expecting that? Now, what we’ve seen is the market didn’t react too negatively, and the initially and the odds of a rate, you know, cut, didn’t really move, even with that in so some of this the market is, I think the market does view inflation in a pickup to some level. There’s a tolerance in there. I think the market’s going to accept but always the question is, does PPI start overtaking this? PPI will sweep to

Ken Moraif
CPI. So how do you like the Trump administration’s I’ll call it a negotiating tactic with the Federal Reserve. Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, comes out, and he says they need to cut interest rates by one and a half percent, you know, because what they’re really looking for, probably, is a quarter of a percent. That’s right, but they come out, we want you to cut it by one and a half percent. So that way the Fed can say, No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to raise it or lower it a quarter of a percent. Ha, you can’t tell me what to

Jordan Roach
do it is. It does seem to extend from how Trump would do this, right? President Trump would do it. And it’s the first time the Treasury Secretary has really been vocal about saying, We, the Fed, should do something different than what they’re doing. So, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if you see that go needs to be 1.5 to 1.7 lower already. And then the Fed goes, Okay, I guess we’ll do a quarter. We’ll

Ken Moraif
do a quarter, and then they can save face. I think they’re doing that because, you know, I think the Fed doesn’t want to be seen as, you know, Trump’s pushing them around. And so if he says 150 basis points, and they do 25 that’s like, hey, no, he didn’t tell us what to do. We’re an independent body. We do not get pushed politicians.

Jordan Roach
And honestly, I hope the Fed doesn’t go with that in one move or two moves, because I think the

Speaker 1
market would price that manic it would be if they dropped 150 minutes. They’re seeing something we’re not seeing, right? All

Ken Moraif
right. So let’s talk about what I think to be the biggest fly in the ointment, and it’s like a cancer that we’ve got, and it just keeps growing and growing. And that’s our our national debt. We crossed over $37 trillion last week, that is, you know, long term, this is unsustainable. I mean, if, if the rest of the world decides that America has reached its credit limit and they stop lending us money because they don’t think we can pay them back anymore, we could have another huge upheaval in the bond market. And the bond market seizing up are the ones that caused a really big, bad recessions, if not the Great Depression, right?

Jordan Roach
And so, in many ways, that’s right. I mean, I think the bond market seizing up would have global, you know, implications certainly would hurt the US stock market. And we are going into, like, the theoretical side at this point of how much can we can continue to print issues we do. And this is that exorbitant. Privilege. This is what the French talked about in the 60s. We have this exorbitant privilege that we continue to play this game, and we can continue to do it until we can’t, until we can’t. But again, so far, what we’ve seen with the auction markets is we do see demand meeting the supply, but at some point that could reverse, and we have seen long term yields pick back up. They’re creeping back upwards.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, people are getting a little nervous. Yes, you know Richard Nixon, one of his famous quotes. I think it was Richard, actually, it was one of his economists, but he borrowed it. Is that things that cannot go on forever won’t pretty good. Is a very philosophic man, right? Philosophical man. So, yeah, so that’s something that is concerning long term, but in the short run, ladies and gentlemen, our view is that we’re going to see new all time highs. Going forward, the Fed, most likely will lower interest rates and the concerns about stagflation and this the national debt, and, you know, these negative things certainly are out there, and that’s why we’re glad we have our invest and protect strategy, because things can come out of the blue that you did not expect, and boom the market can can crash on you like it did in 2008 and y, 2k and many times before. And our strategy is designed to address that and help us to protect our clients from that.

Jordan Roach
Gotta be positioned again. We don’t know. And these things can move very quickly, like, you know, they’re they’re background noises, the market kind of prices in some of that fear in these scenarios, and then they happen, they have and then things move very, very quickly all of a sudden. So it is good to have that net in there to where we can make some very proactive decisions if this all unravels quickly. Yeah.

Ken Moraif
So ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you have the peace of mind that we want you to have, and you let us get the gray hair for you so that you don’t have to. We want to watch out for you and do all that. I want to look I’m looking for some volunteers to come on the podcast. And basically what I want to do is I want to do some segments. I want to do maybe three of them, and I’m looking for client volunteers and square. Volunteers, where I want to have you share your wisdom with other people as to you know what you’ve experienced. So I’m kind of thinking from the standpoint of, what advice would you give your 10 year old, your 10 year younger self, given what you know right now. All right, so if you’re 60, what would you tell the 50 year old you if you’re 70, what would you tell the 60 and if you’re 7060, yeah. And if you’re 80, what would you tell the 70 year old? I think it would be very interesting for our viewers and other people to benefit from your wisdom and your advice, and I want to tell you there’s a reward for it. So I want to introduce you to our own we have we’ve joined the robot world. We have our own let me bring him into let me bring him here. Are you getting him here? Paul, all right, so this is what I call him, arpo. This is arpo, our robot model. Okay, so we’re going into, we have our own robot. Fred, ARPOA. He’s a robot model. He’s modeling what your reward will be if you decide to come on the podcast with me, there is, of course, the retirement planners of America cap, perfect for golf or tennis or anything else you want to wear it for. Sorry there arpo. Love you, man. We have our hoodie. Look at that. This is a nice it’s a Carhartt for those of you know who that brand really nice, very nice and warm, good. And then I want to show you this stuff. This is good right here. This one right here is we got a polo shirt for you see the Polo right there? That’s nice, yeah, for those of you like polos. And then I got to model these the next two for you. So I’m going to actually put them on here. Hold on a sec. Let me do this. This one’s great. This is my favorite, right here, actually, my second favorite. Put this one on,

all right, huh? What do you think? Look at that. This is sharp, nice. It’s not too warm, not too cold. I mean, it keeps you good, and, you know, and when the weather gets a little cooler, very lightweight, but keeps you nice, flattering. You know, it’s got the logo on it. It’s got the collar. Love this. You can have this, or

we have this, the faux turtle neck, very soft cotton. Feel this, Jordan, feel this. That’s nice. Is that soft? That’s the softest. It’s like, it feels like cashmere. I mean, it’s like, so nice and soft. You got this keeps you nice and warm, lightweight, but good, good texture. Of course, you got the logo, proudest moment of your life when you’re wearing this. So we have all kinds of goodies for you. All we’re asking you to do is to volunteer. Come on here with the show. You’ll be doing it with me, so you’ll know it’ll be fine. You’ll have lots of fun, and we’d really appreciate if you did that. So I hope this video found you healthy, wealthy and wise. Thank you for watching SCWPer nation. Enjoy all the rest of you. Keep at it. You’ll get there, and we’ll talk soon.

Please note: transcript has been modified after the time of recording. 

Economic indicators and stock market performance cannot be predicted. Opinions expressed regarding the economy and the stock market belong solely to Ken Moraif on behalf of Retirement Planners of America and may not accurately portray actual future performance of the economy or stock market outcomes. Opinions expressed in this video is intended to be for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as investment advice for individuals who are not clients of Retirement Planners of America. All content provided is the opinion of Ken Moraif, CEO and Founder of RPOA Advisors, Inc. (d/b/a Retirement Planners of America ) (“Retirement Planners of America”, “RPOA”). ©Copyright 2023