• This week our Market Alert Video will cover inflation numbers, consumer confidence numbers, job growth numbers, and what the Fed is going to do about all of that?
• We will also talk about the tariffs and what they’re doing to our portfolio. Let’s dive right in.
• We’ll start with tariffs. All the talk was that tariffs were going to cause inflation, tariffs are going to skyrocket and we’re going to be under. What we’re actually seeing for the third reading in a row is inflation going down. It’s what the market hoped but didn’t expect.
• We’re seeing healthy readings on tariffs, holding steady. By the way, Jordan and I have an incredible podcast on tariffs, and we encourage you to watch it. It will explain why tariffs don’t necessarily cause inflation. In some cases, it can be deflationary.
• We also get into how consumers react, how businesses react, how we collect it… fantastic podcast.
• Inflation went down two tenths of a percent. From a Federal Reserve standpoint, this is what they’ve been watching. This outcome is probably what has prevented them from pulling rates down.
• CPI is one inflation reading and it’s predicting inflation coming down this week. The producer price index is coming in line with expectations. For those that are unaware, PPI is a big gauge. It determines what businesses are paying to produce the goods we consume. Based on this data, there’s a better chance that the Fed brings rates down by the end of the year.
• The Fed has a dual mandate. They have inflation and employment. On the inflation front, inflation is still going down. As far as job growth, job growth is up. The thought was that tariffs would cause unemployment, there was all this fear.
• So far, maybe the effect of tariffs has not been felt. Tariffs do change consumer behavior. It doesn’t necessarily force you to pay more for something when you can just buy something else.
• Businesses have to wrestle with, “Are we really going to have consumer demand if we keep raising prices?” So far, inflation, jobs, both are good. We don’t hear many voices suggesting or hinting toward recession anymore.
• Now, the consumer… 70% of our economy is consumer spending. Consumer confidence went way up after the fears receded.
• It’s going to be interesting to see, with the riots that are going on and all the stuff that’s happening, if consumer confidence will stay where it is or come down. Typically riots come and go, they’re terrible and there’s destruction but confidence creeps back up.
• So basically, we’ve got a pretty good picture. What does that mean for our portfolio? The good news is I think the market is getting some of the worst horror stories off the table, and now we’re 2% off from all time highs. Historically, getting to all time highs is a good thing.
• If you look forward 6-12 months, it’s not a negative outlook. I do think the market is going to have some sort of digestive period that allows us to move on to thinking about earnings. Some of the outside, negative influence may be behind us.
• Another thing to report is President Xi and Trump have come to some sort of agreement. They haven’t both approved it, but they’ve come to some sort of a deal on two important things.
• One of them is the rare earths. We need those. We can’t build our phones and almost all of our technology without magnets and rare earths. Without them, industries would shut down.
• In exchange for reopening the rare earths, they wanted their students to continue to attend our schools. I suspect they wanted access to that intellectual capital.
• From a stock perspective, it looks like we’re headed in the right direction.
• So stock profits look like they’re going to be good. Consumers are going to spend. They’ve got their jobs. They’ve got confidence. Inflation is coming down. All of those are positive for stocks.
• Now let’s talk about bonds. Bonds tend to have an inverse relationship to interest rates. So as interest rates come down, bonds tend to go up.
• If we look at yields, broad treasury yields, and you look at the 10year, the yields have been just as volatile as stocks. If yields are coming down, stocks are going up.
• Now I think we’re waiting to see what inflation is going to do, and what are these treasury auctions going to do, as people are thinking about the deficit and what the Fed is going to do. Honestly, right now, we’re seeing a bit of lift which will march us toward a Fed decision.
• And the bets, the futures, the odds makers, it’s like Vegas. Makers are giving it a 57% chance that in September, the Fed might lower rates again. So that’s better than a coin flip. We’ll have to wait and see on that one but odds appear to be going up.
• If you have continued prints of lower inflation, that is going to worry the Fed, because it’s the cancer of inflation.
• If jobs are going up and inflation is coming down, and if they do lower interest rates, not only will bonds benefit from that, but certainly the confidence in the stock market will grow as well. Because money is cheaper and cost of capital is lower.
• Something I always want to remind the audience is that, you have to be careful when things aren’t rolling along too well that you’re not rolling downhill. Sometimes bear markets and sudden changes in the market happen in the blink of an eye from something that came from left field.
• The whole credit crisis happened and nobody saw it coming. But our strategy saw it coming even though we didn’t know what it was. We just knew that our strategy said to sell in November of 2007.
• When that was announced, you knew that all the banks are about to go under, the real estate market was going to crash, the stock market was going way down. So we can’t be complacent. It’s important that we keep our guard up. We have to be ready and that is why we have our invest and protect strategy.
• Should anything happen, we’re poised to protect you. For the time being, we’re in invest mode.
• Thank you for watching this week’s Market Alert video. Make sure you like and subscribe and share it with your friends and family.
• We hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy, and wise, and we’ll talk again soon.

Transcript
Ken Moraif
Hello everyone, and welcome to our Market Alert Video for June 13, 2025 Friday the 13th. And we just clarified for me, I thought it was Michael, but it’s not. It’s Jason. That was the Friday the 13th guy. But we are going to have a fantastic market alert video for you this week. I hope it finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. We have a ton to talk about. SCWPer nation. I hope you guys are out there SCWPering Your tails off. That’s the job. Our job is to mind the store for you so that you don’t have to. And so let’s dive in. Let me bring Jordan on with me. Jordan, our Chief Investment Officer,

Jordan Roach
Good to be back with you.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, it’s good to see you. I have to tell you, I’ve been talking with clients, and they have said that our Market Alert Videos together are way better than when I was doing them by myself.

Jordan Roach
Oh, that’s hard to believe.

Ken Moraif
I know I’m very offended by that. It’s like, what the heck, me alone is not as good as you know, sometimes the client is not always right. So what are we going to talk about this week? A lot. So we got inflation numbers, we got consumer confidence numbers, we got job growth numbers. What’s the Fed going to do about all that? What about the tariffs we’re going to talk about what that does to our stock portfolio, to our bond portfolio. My goodness, we got we got so much to talk about we should dive right in,

Jordan Roach
Okay.

Ken Moraif
But I got to tell everybody something that’s kind of important happening in my family’s life. My middle daughter, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, is literally within hours of having a baby, her first.

Jordan Roach
Okay!

Ken Moraif
And what’s really cool about it is that she’s decided to call the baby Delphine Lily. And Lily is my mother’s name.

Jordan Roach
That’s lovely.

Ken Moraif
Yeah. So she, she has a connection to my mom, which is kind of, that’s very nice, very cool. And so you’re, you have, you have some important news with regard to baby babies, don’t you? Yes, something important happened.

Jordan Roach
I still have a baby, a toddler, two, almost three, and big milestone for us, because our baby now we are graduating out of diapers.

Ken Moraif
Graduation out of diapers?

Jordan Roach
Huge. It is great week.

Ken Moraif
No, you’re right. It is huge. Yeah, that’s right. Well, congratulations on that. So we both have something to celebrate,

Jordan Roach
Yours is bigger, definitely bigger.

Ken Moraif
Although I have to say is bigger, yeah, definitely bigger. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not a competition, but mine’s bigger. It’s always competition with you. All right, so let’s talk about, first of all, you know, all the talk was that tariffs were going to cause inflation. That’s right, tariffs are going to skyrocket, and we were going to be under, you know, it’s going to go way up. And instead, now, for the third reading in a row, inflation has gone down.

Jordan Roach
It’s what the market, I think, hoped, maybe didn’t expect. Some you know, certainly consumers probably didn’t expect. All the news outlets were always saying, No way it’s possible. But we’re seeing very if, for lack of better term, healthy readings on inflation, holding steady, nothing crazy yet that should be good for markets.

Ken Moraif
Yeah and by the way, everyone we Jordan and I created what I think is a fantastic podcast on tariffs, and I encourage you to watch it, Paul, I think there’s a link somewhere around this video that you can click on that’ll help you to watch it, and it’ll explain why inflation, or rather, tariffs, don’t necessarily cause inflation, in some cases, can actually be deflationary. How does consumer how do consumers react? How do businesses react? How do we collect it? Fantastic podcast. You did a great job. So we’ll so let’s talk about that. So inflation went down, and that was a surprise. It was two tenths of a percent.

Jordan Roach
Uh huh.

Ken Moraif
It was supposed to be more.

Jordan Roach
It was a surprise.

Ken Moraif
And so from a Federal Reserve standpoint, and interest rates and all that, how does that, what was that tell us?

Jordan Roach
I mean I think right now, this is what the Fed is looking at. This is the this is the thing they’ve been watching and been worrying about, it’s probably holding them back from saying, you know, it’s time to go ahead and start pulling rates down. So we got, you know, CPI. There’s a bunch of inflation readings out there, but they’ve got CPI coming down this week. We had producer price index largely coming in line with expectations, and that’s a big gauge, because that’s what businesses are paying to produce the goods that we consume. So I think this is going to give the Fed at least some good data points to say, maybe on the horizon, maybe this year, we can start pulling rates back down.

Ken Moraif
Right, and the Fed has a dual mandate, right? So they’ve got inflation, and then they’ve got employment. Those are dual mandates. So on the inflation front, inflation is still going down.

Jordan Roach
That’s right.

Ken Moraif
So that looks like maybe, you know, it’s time to start thinking about lowering interest rates, because we’re a big ship, and it’s hard to turn it around at the last second.

Jordan Roach
That’s right.

Ken Moraif
So let’s look at the second part of their mandate, which is jobs. And job growth was up.

Jordan Roach
Job growth was up.

Ken Moraif
I thought tariffs was going to cause unemployment too. I thought that all this stuff was going to be terrible for jobs.

Jordan Roach
It was all this fear. Year that was yes, the market was effectively pricing in, baking in, almost expecting, and so far, we haven’t seen it come through.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, and that’s a good word or a good the way you phrase that is good, “So far”. Maybe the full effect of tariffs has not been felt. But as we talk about in the podcast that we made, you know, tariffs sometimes are not inflationary, because all they do is change consumer behavior, right? So it doesn’t necessarily make it to where you know you have to pay more for something. You just buy something else.

Jordan Roach
That’s right. You buy something else if there’s something available, businesses have to wrestle with Are we really going to have the consumer demand if we keep raising prices? Sometimes they have to hold because they’re worried about people not meeting their demands. So as of right now, you know, on the inflation front, on the job front, nothing too worrisome,

Ken Moraif
Yeah.

Jordan Roach
Which is good.

Ken Moraif
And so concerns about recession right now seem, we don’t hear too many voices out there talking about recession. I mean job growth, inflation coming down. So now let’s talk about the other component of our economy, and that’s the consumer. 70% of our economy is consumer spending, consumption,

Jordan Roach
That’s right.

Ken Moraif
And consumer confidence went up.

Jordan Roach
which is huge, because we usually, you know consumer confidence, their sentiment, will drive their behavior. Now it has been waffling. I think consumers like, you know, the news outlets are going up and down, markets going down. But that is good, because right now, you would think that maybe we’ll see some more consistency to consumer confidence. They’ll continue to buy, we’ll continue thinking they’re going to be jobs, then the economy in the market can hold.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see. You know, with the riots that are going on with all the stuff that’s happening, if people, if consumer confidence, will come down, but probably not. It seems like these riots will probably as other riots in the past. They’ll happen. They’re terrible, you know, a lot of destruction and mayhem, but they pass and, you know, consumers go back to spending again.

Jordan Roach
Usually that’s the case. So I would expect kind of more the same there.

Ken Moraif
All right, so basically, a pretty good picture. We got low inflation, inflation coming down. We got jobs going up. We got consumer confidence going up. So, so let’s talk then, about what this means for our stock portfolio, the equity side of our portfolio. What does that how does that bode.

Jordan Roach
I mean, the good news is that I think the market now is getting some of those really worst case scenarios off the table, yeah, but they were really worried about they were having a price back in so if that’s the case, I mean, as of right now, you know, we’re 2% ish away from all time highs, yeah, so that’s a good thing, and be getting closer to all time highs. Tends to be good, not bad, actually.

Ken Moraif
Is that right?

Jordan Roach
Tends to be, historically, getting to all time highs is actually good. If you look forward six months, 12 months, it’s not negative. So, you know, I do think the market is probably going to have some sort of digestive period, or we’re going to need a catalyst to go But largely, you know, we can probably move on to thinking about earnings. Again, true, earnings, job growth, some of the, you know, outside negative influence in the market, maybe behind us, so we can look forward again.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, and one other thing that I is pretty important news that I should have added to the list, and that is, apparently it hasn’t been approved yet by President Xi and Donald Trump. They haven’t both approved it, but they’ve come to some sort of a deal on two important things, right? And it’s interesting to me, you know, one of them, of course, is the rare earths. We need those we can’t build our phones or, you know, almost all of our technology requires magnets and rare earths.

Jordan Roach
Yes.

Ken Moraif
So without it, we those industries would shut down. So that’s very important. And the Chinese agreed to open that flow up because they stopped it,

Jordan Roach
Yes.

Ken Moraif
But in exchange, they wanted to have students still be able to come to our schools.

Jordan Roach
Yes, I’m still wrapping my head around that one too, of why that is the why is that? So that’s what they wanted to pull on, right? I don’t know.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, I guess they want the intellectual capital.

Jordan Roach
I’m sure they want to see what’s going on here, and they can bring things back interesting.

Ken Moraif
So from a from a stock perspective, then it looks like we’re headed in the right direction here.

Jordan Roach
All things want to go maybe again. If I look at, you know, the percentage of companies in an uptrend, if we look at the types of stocks that are leading the market right now, it’s things you’d want to see.

Ken Moraif
good that’s correct, all right. And you know, one of the things that you said a minute ago is really true. You know, if you a lot of times, people think we’re at a new all time high, and so I should sell or, you know what just happened? But the new all time high is after the previous all time and the next all time,

Jordan Roach
That’s right.

Ken Moraif
So, so just because you reach an all time high doesn’t mean you need, yeah, the brakes are not necessarily on, right?

Jordan Roach
That exactly.

Ken Moraif
So, okay, so, so stocks profits look like they’re going to be good. Consumers are going to spend. They’ve got their jobs. They got confidence. Inflation is coming down. All those are positive for stocks. So now let’s talk about bonds. And as we all know, at least everyone that watches our videos…

Jordan Roach
That’s right.

Ken Moraif
…that bonds tend to have an inverse relationship to. To interest rates. So as interest come down, bond values tend to go up.

Jordan Roach
That’s right.

Ken Moraif
So let’s talk about the bond side of our portfolio.

Jordan Roach
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if we look at yields, broad treasury yields, and you look at the 10 year, I mean, it’s in some ways, the yields have been just as volatile as stocks have. Everyone’s trying to price in inflation and growth what the Fed’s going to do, but we’ve seen yields come back down a little bit, and so that means bonds, generally speaking, are going up. And now I think we’re waiting to see again, what’s inflation going to do, and, you know, what are these Treasury auctions going to do, as people were thinking about the deficit, and then what the Fed’s going to do? But largely, right now, we’re seeing a little bit of lift, you know, with most types of bonds, and it’s going to be marching towards, really, a Fed decision.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, and right now, the bets, the futures, which are basically, you know, the odds makers like, it’s like Las Vegas rights makers are giving it a 57% chance that in September, the Fed might lower interest rates again. We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

Jordan Roach
Yeah. So they’re saying better, better than a coin flip. I don’t know if I would bet the same way, but I do think you have, if you have continued prints of lower inflation, that is going to get the biggest thing behind the Fed that they’re worried about, which is the cancer of inflation.

Ken Moraif
Yeah.

Jordan Roach
So I think it’s on the table. I think if you would, you know, said a month or two ago, it probably said maybe the end of the year, maybe, so the odds are coming up. But again, lot, a lot can happen.

Ken Moraif
Yeah and from the Fed standpoint, if jobs are growing and inflation is coming down, you know? And if the and if they do lower interest rates, not only will bonds benefit from that, but certainly the confidence in the stock market will grow, right? Because it’s like money is cheaper we can get

Jordan Roach
cost of capital is lower, everything else.

Ken Moraif
Yeah. So the positive outlook,

Jordan Roach
Yes.

Ken Moraif
So there you are. Ladies and gentlemen, it looks all good. And you know, the thing that I always want to remind you of is that, you know you have to be careful when things aren’t rolling along too well, that you’re not rolling downhill. And so, you know, sometimes bear markets and sudden changes in the market happen in the blink of an eye from something that came out of left field that almost no one saw. You know, I mean, the whole credit crisis happened, and nobody saw it coming. You know, our strategy saw it coming, but we didn’t know what it was. We just knew that our strategy said to sell in November of 2007 but boy, when that was announced, you know that all the banks are about to go under, and the real estate market was going to crash, the stock market went way down. So we can’t be complacent. We always have to keep our guard up. We have to be ready, and that’s why we have our Invest and Protect Strategy. Should you know the worst happen? We’re ready to take action to protect you, but for the time being right, we’re in invest mode, which is good. So thank you for watching this week’s Market Alert Video. Make sure you like and subscribe. Make sure you share it with your friends and your family. And also, a client was asking me, Are you guys still taking on new clients? And I was like, yes, absolutely. So if you have anybody that you want to send our way, please do so. Thanks for watching hope this video found you healthy, wealthy and wise, and we’ll talk soon.

Our Podcast on Tariffs: https://youtu.be/DlWg22XUGm0

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