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00:00It's another year we're able to produce enough crops to feed the world plus.
00:07So should this ease also some inflationary pressures on our citizens?
00:19Good morning. Welcome to the Myers Report Fast 15. It is Friday, August 15th.
00:26Today, President Trump is off to Anchorage, Alaska on a peace mission with President Putin of Russia.
00:33However, this will be different from the July 16th, 2018 meeting, though they are adversaries and make no mistake, they are.
00:41The undiscussed commonality between the men is that both were betrayed by U.S. insiders.
00:48Then DNI Chief James Clapper and Special Counsel Robert Mueller both tried to sabotage the meeting with blatantly false Russia-Russia election interference allegations, which they both knew were false.
01:04Let's not mince words. These men are traitors to our country and the Constitution that they swore to defend.
01:10This meeting is about a lot more than peace in Ukraine.
01:14It is also about normalization of relations between our two nations and the advancement of both.
01:20Let us hope that cool heads prevail and that the bad guys on both sides stay quiet.
01:26As for the outcome, make no mistake.
01:29Trump is as tough a negotiating adversary as there ever was, and Putin knows this.
01:36Our call? Trump to win on all fronts.
01:40Don Day, you mean that wasn't you hanging below the balloon last week?
01:46What was it?
01:47No, if I was hanging underneath that balloon, I wouldn't be here.
01:51It went to 100,000 feet.
01:53So it was not designed to carry people.
01:57Okay.
01:59Actually, I thought that there was one that was set up to go up to 100,000 feet, complete with a Michelin chef.
02:06It was.
02:06They just went out of business.
02:08So.
02:12Okay.
02:14Don, the fall is almost upon us, and it is getting close to harvest season, which is just around the corner.
02:22How is the USDA looking at our food production?
02:25Well, the report that just came out here recently, it looks like it's going to be a record corn crop.
02:32The almost 190 bushels per acre are the numbers coming on out.
02:40So it's going to be a bumper crop for corn.
02:43May end up being the biggest.
02:45Don't know yet.
02:46Soybeans are well above last year.
02:51Wheat is about the same.
02:54So food production in the United States, and also globally, very good this summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
03:00So again, it's another year we're able to produce enough crops to feed the world plus.
03:08So should this ease also some inflationary pressures on our citizens?
03:14Well, should be.
03:16You know, I'm not a person to really talk about in terms of the markets, but obviously when you have this much supply, that's going to affect things.
03:24Beef prices, though, are still through the roof.
03:26So that's affecting some prices.
03:31Okay.
03:31Tropical Storm Aaron.
03:33Is it Memorex, or is this going to be a real hurricane?
03:36It's going to be a real hurricane, and it's going to be a big one.
03:39The good news is it looks like it's going to stay out in the Atlantic.
03:43Now, it may brush the Bahamas.
03:46It may get some of those island areas off the southeast coast of the U.S.
03:51We have to watch it.
03:52I don't think it's a foregone conclusion.
03:54It's a complete miss.
03:55It may brush the mid-Atlantic with a little bit of weather, but this is the first major hurricane of the season.
04:03There will likely be more behind it, but here we are in the middle of August.
04:07It's taken a long time for a major hurricane to form in the Atlantic this summer.
04:11So how deep are we in the hurricane season?
04:14Well, we're really entering the peak of when the peak hurricane season is about now through September into early October.
04:23Don, I've had to keep my air conditioning on all month and all of July.
04:30Is there any relief in store for us in terms of the weather?
04:34Yeah, it's August, so this time of year you expect to run the air conditioner.
04:42But at the end of this month, you'll get some cooling.
04:46So the next week to 10 days will be hot.
04:48After that, it will cool off.
04:50And we'll talk about this later, but it's going to be a long winter in Michigan this year.
04:56Don, I wish I would have asked you a couple of weeks ago about weather in the Middle East.
05:02My family just got back where they spent about two weeks out there where the weather was consistently above 110 degrees and they were absolutely miserable.
05:12So I wish I would have got your input before they went over.
05:16Isaac, good morning.
05:21Is the crackdown on illegal aliens impacting our capacity to deliver goods?
05:26No, no, not illegal aliens.
05:28The English proficiency is more of an impact, but that affects, we don't have illegals.
05:33We don't have many illegals in our industry.
05:36It's more people here on work visas that have plagued our industry with the overcapacity.
05:41But, yeah, illegals, no, the work visa people who are here are definitely significantly hurting our industry right now.
05:52Are there, in fact, illegal aliens even driving trucks?
05:56No, no, not illegals.
05:58If there is, it's a very, very small amount.
06:01Again, going back, our issue is drivers who are in trucks that don't understand the rules of the road here in America,
06:07that don't understand the language, that get imported from God knows what country.
06:11Get handed a CDL by the carrier that's hiring them and turn them pretty much into indentured servants by giving them $180,000 lease to own unit.
06:20But that's that's a deeper conversation.
06:22Where I was going with this is I saw an argument against the deportation of illegal aliens,
06:29that it was going to hurt the trucking industry and make it difficult for us to deliver goods.
06:36Which apparently is, would I be accurate in saying it's utter nonsense?
06:41Utter nonsense.
06:42I would even say that the, you know, the driver shortage that we've all seen on the headlines over the last probably four or five years in a post-COVID environment,
06:50you know, we see plenty of capacity in the industry.
06:53A lot of people on the carrier side are really pushing back to a lot of the agencies like the American Trucking Association,
06:59Illinois Trucking Association that continue to lobby D.C. to try to get more leniency to bring truck drivers in here.
07:06There's plenty of drivers in here and it's affecting hard work in American businesses.
07:11OK, the DEF issue, diesel exhaust fluid, is that system going to be corrected and how long will it take to get it done?
07:19So they've already made adjustments.
07:21The EPA already came out August.
07:23So, yeah, this month.
07:24Can you tell us what this is about?
07:26I'm not familiar with it.
07:27So, yeah, the DPF, DEF system, think of a Cadillac converter for your car.
07:32It's something that they added to the industry in 2008.
07:35So pretty much it takes the emissions and it cleans it where the exhaust comes out just completely clear.
07:41I don't I can't get into the actual like mechanics and the science behind it, Robert.
07:46But I do know, again, it's it's it's all about cleaning the emissions.
07:50First year was 2008.
07:52What's what this adjustment is all about is read is shutting off the shut off sensor to the truck when the DEF fluid gets low.
08:06So the DEF fluid, once it hits a certain level, that truck will actually what they call D rate.
08:11It will actually shut down where the driver can only go five miles per hour.
08:16The issue with this is like any other piece of equipment.
08:19The more tech you put into it, the more that goes wrong.
08:22So what happens very, very, very often is that even though levels may not be below minimum levels for it to actually shut down, the truck will shut down.
08:33The sensors will go bad.
08:34And all of a sudden you got a truck that somewhere God knows where that's only doing five miles an hour was it impacts businesses like me in a very, very big way that runs newer equipment versus older equipment that don't have this.
08:48Many smaller carriers still run 2007 pieces of equipment and older to avoid these issues.
08:55A lot of larger carriers, you know, we upgrade our fleet and we're, you know, we're kind of we kind of have to deal with it.
09:02But when these happen, it's a very costly repair.
09:04You got to get a tow that's going to cost you two, three thousand dollars.
09:07You got to take it to a dealership because they're the only ones to have the computers to handle it.
09:11And that's another four or five thousand dollars.
09:14So it's a big it's a big deal.
09:16The industry carriers, truck drivers are very, very happy about this adjustment because it's going to it's going to really get rid of a lot of unnecessary maintenance on our on our equipment.
09:28Bob Janetsky, we've had two weeks of a sluggish stock market activity and this week was different.
09:36How is it different and why?
09:38Oh, the market woke up.
09:39All of a sudden, two percent gains in most of the major indexes and over four percent gain in the small caps that had been kind of lagging everything else for a while.
09:54And they're coming back now.
09:56So what's happening again?
09:58The upward pressure that we've seen, the optimism in the eyes of investors has just been extremely strong.
10:06And when it's strong, it tends to remain strong until something happens to shift it in the other direction.
10:14How long do you think it'll continue?
10:15I have no idea.
10:18What I would say is that once it continues, it tends to just build on itself.
10:25And we have the short term model that I've talked about on the stock market that tries to measure the extent of this upward momentum.
10:33And that model continues to be very, very strong.
10:37The latest three days, it was at 100 percent, which is the maximum on a daily basis, on a weekly basis.
10:45It's like 96 percent.
10:47These are all very strong incentive readings.
10:51And when you have this strong of an incentive reading, you just don't want to be away from the stock market.
10:59You know, how long term rates doing such as the 10 year treasury?
11:05They have drifted lower and lower.
11:09I've talked about this four and a half percent key rate for the 10 year treasury.
11:15When it's below that, we feel a lot better that people are and the financial markets are not concerned about inflation.
11:22And that's gone down now to four and a quarter percent.
11:25It's a quarter point lower than that key level.
11:28But the interesting thing is it's drifted down in a very stable manner.
11:33You haven't seen this wild swings that we had seen earlier in the year.
11:38And all that is good news.
11:40OK, do you see any softening in the economy?
11:43Well, we see a softening in terms of the labor market, all of the labor market figures.
11:48It's not just.
11:49Do you see any softening of the economy?
11:52Yeah, we see the softening of the economy in the labor market.
11:54It's not just the BLS numbers that Trump was so upset about.
11:59The ADP numbers, those are actual real numbers because ADP does payroll for 320 million workers.
12:09And we get those figures every month.
12:11And those figures have slowed significantly.
12:14There was a big, that was actually a downturn.
12:17And then they came back a little bit in the latest month.
12:21But overall, the labor market does appear to be weak this summer.
12:26OK, the Fed meeting is coming up next month.
12:30Will they lower their target for interest rates?
12:32I believe they will.
12:34The inflation numbers, we had some misreporting this week.
12:39You may have seen the wholesale prices were through the roof, up almost 1% in the month.
12:46That's like a 12% annual rate.
12:48And that got headlines all over the place.
12:51When you dig through the numbers, most of it was food and energy prices just happened to spike.
12:57And they're very volatile.
12:58When you take it out, take out the food and energy, it was like a quarter of a percent increase in wholesale prices for finished goods.
13:07And that's a 3% or so annual rate.
13:10So we're not looking at a spike in inflation that you saw in the headlines.
13:16We are looking at inflation that's more in the 3% to 3.5% area than the 2% area.
13:23But that's much lower than people had expected based on the tariffs.
13:28Well, if Trump can pull off peace in the Middle East, that should lower energy costs, and food costs for that matter.
13:36I hope you're right on that.
13:39It's going to be tough negotiating, though, with Putin to get anything.
13:44That's true.
13:45It's going to be tough.
13:46But I think the needs are there.
13:49Bob, what does your stock market model say for the short term?
13:54But the short term, the upward pressure should continue.
13:58And by its nature, the momentum is always going to be strong when the market continues up.
14:03The real key is when the market starts to turn, how much of a turn really takes away a lot of this upward momentum.
14:11And that's what the market is designed to do.
14:14But so far, we haven't seen enough of a turn to suggest we should be concerned.
14:18Okay, let's talk about our optimism question.
14:22Don Day, are you still optimistic about the future?
14:26Yeah, well, after a bumper crop, I know that I'm going to be able to eat here for a while, so I'm optimistic.
14:33Isaac, are you optimistic?
14:36I don't got to worry about spending $5,000 to $10,000 on a bad center anymore with the DPF ratings.
14:42I'm very optimistic, Gary, with a lot of other things, too.
14:46Well, yes, a new baby in the house can always make you happy.
14:49Bob Janetsky, are you optimistic?
14:53I am.
14:53I like the way the longer-term interest rates are coming down nice and steady.
14:58I think that's great.
14:59The Fed is going to be cutting, I believe, at least by a quarter of a percentage point come the meeting, which is on September 17th.
15:09And all of that looks like good news for the market at this point.
15:13Okay, with that, have a great weekend.
15:16Be well, stay safe, and God bless America.
15:21You
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