The Myers Report 10-11-2024 _ Fast _15
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00:00Good morning, everyone.
00:04Welcome to the Friday Meyers Report Fast 15.
00:07It is October 11th, 2024.
00:12It's been a hell of a week.
00:13It's been a difficult week.
00:15Helene and then Milton, the former being either grotesque negligence in how it's being handled
00:22or worse.
00:24And it's interesting.
00:26I spoke to my cousin who lives in Wilmington, whom I had not spoken to for probably 20 years.
00:32I just called to see how she was doing.
00:35And her comment was, beside the fact that she's a never trumper, which she made very
00:42clear before I even said a word.
00:45She was talking about all the misinformation and the harm it was doing when people were
00:52talking about, complaining about the relief efforts, which is just incredibly ignorant.
01:04What we have seen in North Carolina is the military, which has tremendous resources,
01:12was trying to move but was not allowed to move for 10 to 12 days after the hurricane.
01:19And I'm talking about the 82nd Airborne in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the Marines
01:26in Cherry Point, and the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
01:30The logjam there was finally broken by another friend of ours, Jim Womack, whose brother
01:39is a congressman, basically had the commanding general of Fort Campbell call Jim up quickly,
01:48which he did.
01:49Jim gave him an update as to what was really going on.
01:54And he got through to, he assigned one of his brigadiers, I guess, who called the governor
02:00of North Carolina and apparently was literally screaming at the guy because nothing could
02:08move without the governor's permission.
02:11It was so bad at one point on Sunday or Monday, there were about 300 helicopters flying in
02:19relief.
02:20Of those 300, 297, all but three were private helicopters because the military was not being
02:29allowed to be used and they've got the resources.
02:32And these people have been left to suffer and die.
02:37Whether it was grotesque negligence or deliberate, I'm not prepared to say.
02:42But the very best that could be said, it was grotesque negligence, disconnect, and
02:48just simply not caring.
02:51That being said, one of the theories that people have is that somebody didn't want the
02:58western counties of North Carolina to be able to vote.
03:03With that question in mind, whether it was deliberate, accidental, or whatever, Jay,
03:11we have with us Jay DeLancey, who's an expert on voting systems of what is going on in North
03:17Carolina.
03:18Jay is in North Carolina from, what is it, Sanford, Jay?
03:23Yeah.
03:24Okay.
03:25The center of the state, yeah.
03:27These past 10 days in North Carolina have been, North Carolina has literally been through
03:32hell.
03:33Can you please update us on how the state is going to make a fair election possible
03:38for the western red counties?
03:42Yeah.
03:44First off, the hell continues.
03:46They're still finding bodies, and these are bodies that have been laid there so long that
03:52vultures are eating them, and the reporting is going to be slower.
03:56I'm hearing this from legislative people, that it continues.
04:01There's roads, there's places that are isolated.
04:04It's really ugly.
04:05The Board of Elections did put together a wish list of things they want, and on its
04:11surface, I've evaluated what the state actually codified with it, and on its surface, it's
04:20not bad.
04:21The problem with it, as we've already seen, is it can be used to disenfranchise and to
04:27maneuver at the last minute to minimize the amount of Republican votes in a given county,
04:35and we're already seeing that played out.
04:38How big will this be?
04:39I don't think it'll matter.
04:40I think so many Republicans will walk across burning coals to vote for Trump that it won't
04:45matter, but on the other hand, these people, they're isolated, and they have a lot of problems
04:51just dealing with life.
04:53I could go through the weeds on it, but the beauty, the good things about it are that
04:57it's allowing an all-hands drill, where normally you have to live in the county in order to
05:04be an employee of the polls, and now they're saying you can bring somebody in from outside
05:09of the county.
05:10That's true for poll observers, too.
05:12They've opened the door up for anyone to come in and work it.
05:16Of course, the drawback to this is these are career employees from the state board, and
05:21these are career Democrat employees, or worse.
05:26On their best day, they're just garden variety Democrats, but anyway, they're going to be
05:31making all the calls.
05:33They're requiring paper ballots and voter IDs?
05:40There's no change in that, this state law.
05:43If a county, we do have some counties that are fully, you raised a good question, and
05:51I want to see if those counties are affected, because there are a few counties that have
05:56gone 100% DRE, or touchscreen, or paperless ballots.
06:03I hate those.
06:05We've tried to fight it as best we can.
06:07They didn't have all that.
06:09Jimmy Carter hated, he was, Jimmy Carter was one of the biggest opponents to mail-in ballots.
06:16Yeah, well, when it comes to electronic voting machines, ES&S has a lot of money and a lot
06:24of lobbyists, and they get what they want in North Carolina, and that's just the ground
06:29truth of it, because we have a Republican veto-proof majority, and Republicans love
06:35money, too.
06:36Who knew?
06:37Anyway, the local jurisdictions, they're going to have a lot more access to get people in,
06:43and that's the good news.
06:45I think there'll be lots of opportunities for people to vote, regardless of where they
06:49are statewide.
06:52Does that mean there'll also be a greater likelihood for fraud?
06:55Yes.
06:56Does it mean, do Democrats have a plan that they can dust off and implement to take advantage
07:02of these measures?
07:03They could, because the Democrat director of elections is who wrote the plan that the
07:08legislature rubber-stamped, so we won't know until we get closer as to how they're actually
07:14doing it.
07:15The only thing we've seen in advance was a lot of questionable registrations that are
07:21coming up, that are getting flooded into the zone at the last minute.
07:24They're very difficult to remove them until after the election, but we're seeing a lot
07:29of that.
07:30If these two acts are related, there will be some element of fraud.
07:34The only question is, can we, as Trump says, can we beat the fraud margin?
07:39So I'm going in the weeds.
07:43Do you think that the effort to get a fair result will be successful?
07:49Yeah, in my gut, I think the margins are so far apart.
07:54You got 25% of black voters polling for Trump.
08:00That's polling.
08:01That's what they're willing to tell somebody else.
08:04Those numbers are a lot higher.
08:06The Hispanics, the same thing.
08:08Kamala does terrible among males and Hispanic males and black males.
08:16I've guarded optimism that North Carolina is going to be okay.
08:20I mean, not to blow smoke up your skirt, but that's my gut.
08:24Jay, thank you very much.
08:26Don Day.
08:27Don, now that we have Milton, Florida's Ron DeSantis seems to be handling the crisis well,
08:36certainly better than North Carolina's Governor Roy Cooper.
08:40For the next few weeks, what kind of weather should the people of Western North Carolina
08:45expect?
08:46Will it be getting cold?
08:48Unfortunately, yes, there's good news and bad news.
08:53First of all, the bad news first.
08:55There's a cold shot coming into the eastern U.S. and the mid-Atlantic this coming week,
09:00especially between Tuesday and Friday.
09:04They get to see freezing temperatures.
09:05I'm pretty sure they will see freezing temperatures.
09:08I don't see much in the way of rain, but they're going to have to go through some cold now
09:12and it's going to last several days.
09:14Now, the good news is this.
09:16The beginning of the end of the hurricane season is starting.
09:19I don't see any tropical activity in Florida, the Gulf or the southeast United States over
09:23the next week.
09:24And if we can get through the next week or two, I think the season's over for hurricanes.
09:30But the colder weather, I think, is going to be the biggest concern.
09:35Was anything besides the fact, well, was there anything particularly unusual about these
09:41hurricanes? Or are they just weather?
09:45Yeah, it's whether we remember we had talked at the beginning of the year, this was going
09:49to have the potential to be a bad hurricane season.
09:52What it ended up being is a hurricane season that was far short in the number of
09:56hurricanes. The number of hurricanes was expected to be higher.
10:00But these hurricanes that did hit the two are very, very impactful, you know, hitting
10:06square on in a heavily populated area.
10:09So the impacts of hurricanes, I think, are more important than the number of.
10:13And that's certainly something that we've learned this past year.
10:17But everybody who is in the forecasting business for hurricanes knew the potential was
10:21there. You know, six months ago, we could see it coming.
10:25Don, could you talk about the potential of the government to do something to make these
10:31hurricanes worse?
10:33There's an awful lot of scuttlebutt going on about government perhaps having had a
10:39hand in this. Can you comment on that?
10:41Yeah. And this is where the scuttlebutt comes from, because with everything, there's a
10:45little bit of a grain of truth.
10:47For many years and even more recently, the government has funded, either through
10:54government projects or through universities, what I call geoengineering of weather and
10:59climate experiments.
11:02OK, so it's true the government's been dabbling in experiments.
11:07But there's a big difference between experiments and having a fully operational
11:13program to manipulate and control the weather.
11:16And that's where things have gotten out of hand, is that there's a grain of truth to
11:20it. But what's been really interesting over the last week with the Marjorie Taylor Greene
11:24comments is that it's exposing both sides of the spectrum.
11:31The extreme left blames everything on CO2 and climate change.
11:34I mean, everything, which is the result of human activity.
11:38And then some people on the far right are claiming government conspiracies of
11:43controlling the weather.
11:44So both sides of the extremes are trying to claim the same thing through different
11:48means. And I actually think this week has been quite enlightening because you can
11:53stand back and look at both sides as absolutely absurd and nothing to back it up.
12:00So basically, the government has come out and said that it can't control the weather.
12:06And if that, in fact, is true, what's the point of any of the all these climate
12:12initiatives? It sounds like it's pissing in the wind.
12:16Yeah, I don't want to give Marjorie Taylor Greene too much credit, but she did flush it
12:20out, probably by accident.
12:22OK, Bob Junetsky, what is your take on how these storms are going to
12:29impact business levels and inflation?
12:32By the way, the first obvious effect for October is it's going to weaken the economic
12:38numbers when you destroy a lot of assets.
12:41That's a negative in terms of the GDP accounts.
12:44And when people can't work because their factories have been knocked out, that lowers
12:51the income. So what we can do is we have a temporary negative to the economy in terms
12:57of growth being less than it was, at least for the month of October, late September into
13:02October. Then you have the rebuilding to replace all these things.
13:08And the rebuilding is naturally going to end up increasing economic
13:15activity. It's going to increase spending in the economy.
13:18It's going to increase real growth as they rebuild.
13:22And it's going to increase inflation as there's greater demand for labor, greater demand for
13:27materials.
13:28I want to put a question, Bob, I want to put a question to Isaac that sort of relates to
13:34this. Isaac, last week, no one in the country was asking for trucks coming to aid
13:40North Carolina. Has that changed at all?
13:43No, no, Gary, I've been doing this almost 13 years now.
13:47Anytime that we've seen any type of disaster that even got close to what we've seen in North
13:51Carolina with Helene, the phones go are ringing off the hook, looking for help, looking for
13:57trucks to get down to provide supplies and to provide that assistance.
14:01And the emails, our email in our boxes literally get clogged with requests for that same
14:07exact request, getting, you know, having trucks go down there to provide relief.
14:12We literally see email subject lines that have come in in the past that say open
14:18checkbook, name your price, whatever the truck needs to get down there, just head down
14:22there. We haven't seen an ounce of that.
14:24And I spent a lot of time talking to my peers in the industry and they're reporting the
14:29same exact thing.
14:31Bob, fuel prices are up, which are obviously impacting inflation.
14:39What is your forecast regarding future inflation on the stock market?
14:43Yeah, we've started to see the beginning of prices going up.
14:47I think that's just the first hint of the fact that when you add all this extra demand,
14:51because a lot of these houses have to be rebuilt, a lot of the roads have to be rebuilt.
14:57That's a huge increase.
14:58It's exogenous and nothing to do with the Fed or what the Fed is doing.
15:03But the demand for all sorts of resources are going to go up.
15:08And that demand, given the extent of the destruction, could last per quarter, after
15:13quarter, after quarter.
15:15It can take six months, nine months, a year before you get a lot of that rebuilt.
15:20And the pressure on inflation is going to go up.
15:24It has nothing to do with the Fed.
15:26The Fed has, I think, done a pretty good job of getting everything under control, but
15:32they can't control when you have an exogenous demand like this for resources.
15:37So I think there's going to be more pressure on the economy, more pressure on inflation.
15:42And the Fed's really got a big problem here because they cut interest rates by half a
15:48percentage point, short-term interest rates.
15:51Since they've cut, long-term interest rates have gone up by a half point.
15:56Now, why would that be?
15:58Well, I think the markets are very nervous that with all this extra pressure on prices
16:04as a result of the rebuilding, the Fed's simply going to push money into the system to
16:11accommodate it. And that would push off getting inflation under control for maybe another
16:16year. So the Fed's in a very difficult position.
16:19Unfortunately, I think they're going to cut rates another quarter of a percent when they
16:24meet on November 7th, which is their next meeting.
16:28And I think that that's going to hurt their attempt to get inflation under control and
16:35postpone their target for maybe another year or even longer.
16:41Question, Isaac, with the increased demand that's going to be needed for rebuilding, is
16:48the truck and logistic capacity there?
16:52Oh, the capacity is certainly there.
16:54Absolutely. Yeah, we don't have a capacity issue.
16:58Our industry has been in a recession for the last 32 months because of overcapacity.
17:03Right now, the industry needs more volume.
17:05So the trucks are ready and willing to provide assistance into North Carolina or even
17:12Florida for that.
17:14So that would be a moderating impact on inflation.
17:17Correct. Bob, where do you see, what's your take on where the stock market's going to go?
17:24Well, and there are two factors, longer term and shorter term.
17:28The long term factor is the stock market, as I see it, continues to be overvalued.
17:33The S&P 500, 37 percent above what I believe would be a fair value.
17:40So it's overvalued.
17:42However, we also have, and normally that would be a negative for investing in stocks.
17:47However, we have a short term model based on the momentum that's building in the stock
17:53market. And that short term model has been extremely positive for a long period of
17:59time. And the latest month or so, we've never seen our readings go below 80 to 100
18:07percent. What that suggests is that there is enough momentum in the stock market up to
18:15now to carry over into the future.
18:17So I'm optimistic on short term moves.
18:20Now, short term moves obviously can go anywhere.
18:23Market doesn't say anything about what happens tomorrow.
18:26So we have to continue to look at the market day by day and see if that momentum kind of
18:31boulders or if it continues.
18:33So long as it continues, I'm looking for a positive outlook for the market.
18:39Do you see any economic shocks coming in the next three weeks that might impact the
18:43election? Oh, my gosh.
18:46Anything can happen with this election, as we've seen already.
18:51And by their nature, they would be shocks.
18:55But up to now, you know, things have been pretty calm.
18:59As we had suggested, we thought the polls would tilt more in the direction of Trump as
19:08we got closer and closer to the election.
19:10That's starting to happen.
19:12Whether or not it continues, we'll just have to wait and see.
19:15But I think that's the main thing.
19:18Anything that happens that would change the current trend in polling would be a shock
19:23and could affect the stock market.
19:26OK, on that note, have a good weekend.
19:30Stay safe. Pray for the people of North Carolina, Florida and Georgia.
19:36I mean, the stories, it just makes me want to cry.
19:43Be well and God bless America.