Inflation, Should You be Worried? Plus, Ferrari is Racing Ahead, and Evangelion is FIRE
I am really sorry that I have not posted in five days. It has been a truly insane past few days, including a homework trip to midnight last night. Thanks, partially psycho-English teacher! Anyway, now it’s super late on a Friday night, and I am typing away on this website because of my self-imposed, never more than five days, thing. So, this will probably only be a few hundred words, sorry :(.
As you probably saw a few days ago, inflation ticked up, and it ticked up a lot, 0.5% in total. Now, inflation is at 3%, which is a bit higher than The Fed would want. Boy, this inflation is super sticky (pause) and really annoying. However, I will NOT give Jamie Dimon’s annoying ass any props for calling this because it was not hard to foresee. Big shocker, unsettling currency markets and economies by proclaiming that you are going to make everything more expensive and harder to move around created an inflationary environment. More tax cuts and de-regulation will also drive inflation up, even though rates are still pretty high. If this 10% tariff on China holds, then all goods from China will cost about 10% more, which also is not a massive shocker.
That said, I am not too worried about the stock market. I thought that people would freak out a lot more, but the markets seemed to not care at all. My very aggressive portfolio was down 27 cents on the day, and I think the Nasdaq may have even been up. We’ll see if inflation continues to worsen, but a month-on-month trend of inflation continuing to deepen will be highly worrying. I am not worried about stagflation yet, but I think if the US economy slips into a stagflationary environment, it will be very hard to make money for years to come.
Speaking of making money, Ferrari has continued to drive further and further up. In the past month, the stock is up 20%. I think this is happening for a few reasons. First, there is pretty low volume, with only a few hundred thousand shares traded per day, so optimism is actualized in the price very easily. Also, European stocks, bizarrely, have been doing quite well in the past month or two, and I think Ferrari is getting caught up in the fanfare a bit. Also, and this is the most obvious reason, their most recent quarter was pretty great. In the last quarter, their reported earnings leading into it were not as strong, and the stock was pretty much flat for the next three months. This most recent quarter was great financially, and now the price is increasing. It’s weird. I know stocks trade based on the future, but it almost feels like the price is acting like a lagging indicator.
Either way, I think Ferrari is a very safe place to put your money, in any economic environment because simply, rich people are going to buy Ferraris.
Finally, Evangelion is SO GOOD. I have been watching it with my brother (shout out Ethan), and even though they are sexualizing the 13-year-old characters a lot, which makes me feel weird, the show is just so good. I highly recommend it.
