Debt and Everything Else
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We had an interesting week in financial markets … The Fed did exactly what they were expected to by any reasonable person – nothing more, nothing less. They acknowledged the economy is improving, they said they were “talking about talking about” slowing down their quantitative easing. And they indicated two years from now as a time where the fed funds rate may be 50 basis points higher than it is now (may it be so).
And that was it. No actions, policies, or steps. No commitments, promises, or assurances. Just loose language around some policy measures that are (a) Brutally obvious, (b) Not remotely hawkish, and (c) Not nearly enough if the conditions people are saying they are worried about are actually present.
So how did people respond? After three months of people saying “inflation is here” and the “Fed must act” – what happened?
Commodities got hammered, and the yield curve flattened more than it has in ages.
You can’t make this stuff up.
But rather than re-hash what I think the Fed will do, or what they should do, or what is going on in the inflation ad nauseum discussions, I think this week’s Dividend Cafe needs to better unpack what the real, actual, accurate under-current is to all of this.
More or less, every single topic being discussed right now has as its true foundation the reality of debt. The accumulation of debt. Concerns about debt. Plans for more debt. Questions about servicing of debt. The promise of debt. The fear of debt. The cost of debt. For a four-letter word where 25% of its letters are actually silent, this is a pretty potent word in 2021 economics.
And it is the subject of this week’s Dividend Cafe. Let’s dive in.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and |
| 0:07.3 | dividends in your understanding of economic life. Well, hello, welcome to another week's edition of the |
| 0:16.4 | Dividing Cafe of both you all listening on the podcast and those of you watching the video. |
| 0:22.7 | I hope that you all will have a wonderful Father's Day weekend. |
| 0:27.4 | You may be able to tell watching the video. |
| 0:29.5 | I'm out here at our Hampton's house, the whole family, and looking forward to a nice weekend. |
| 0:36.2 | And the reality is it's been a pretty exciting week in markets. |
| 0:40.0 | And there's a few things that need to be talked about. And yet, I want to talk about today |
| 0:46.4 | in a way that I think really captures the heart of the matter. And there's all these kind of |
| 0:51.9 | symptoms, I guess, is a word you could use. There's a lot of |
| 0:55.1 | tentacles coming out of a foundational issue. And there's a lot of attention on the tentacles. |
| 1:03.5 | There's a lot of discussion for pretty good reason on inflation, on the Fed, on what to expect |
| 1:09.6 | from quantitative easing, on expectations of economic |
| 1:13.1 | growth, expectations for economic recovery. |
| 1:16.5 | So you have all these kinds of things that we talk about that are going on that really, |
| 1:21.4 | in my opinion, really do matter. |
| 1:23.7 | And yet I think that what everything comes down to it a certain way, |
| 1:28.3 | and I'm going to spend our time together today to define that way, define what this means. |
| 1:33.3 | It really does come down to the subject of debt. |
| 1:38.3 | It comes down to the subject of corporate debt, of various debt ratios, of the cost of debt, of national |
| 1:49.8 | debt, governmental debt, all of these things that are going on at once. And I think that the |
| 1:55.6 | way by the end of this podcast, hopefully what all have done is kind of laid out how all these |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.