Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:05 This is Annuity Straight Talk. Since 2008, your host Brian Anderson, has helped clients nationwide navigate the complex market for annuities With Brian's assistance, hundreds of clients have achieved a profitable and secure retirement. I would know because Brian has answered many of my questions concerning annuities and retirement planning so that you can benefit as well. Let's get started. Here's Brian.
Speaker 2 00:00:48 Hello and welcome everyone to the Annuity Straight Talk podcast, episode number 80. Brian Anderson, your host, founder and creator of Annuity straight talk.com, talking about everything important for retirees in this day and age. I'm happy to do it, been working on it a long time. And by popular request we've got one of everybody's favorite guest is back John Bomber in Southern California. Hey buddy, how you doing Brian?
Speaker 3 00:01:14 Thanks for having me back. How's everything going? It's good to
Speaker 2 00:01:17 See you. Not bad. You know, I'll pretend everybody asks. Hey, what? Hey, have you talked to John lately? What's he doing? Yeah, I talk to John all the time. He just hasn't been on the podcast in a while.
Speaker 3 00:01:25 That's right, man. What an exciting week. Right? Lots of news going on.
Speaker 2 00:01:30 Well, it's, and we've wanted to get you back and I've tried to stay ahead of these podcasts and they gotta be produced before they air, before they go out to the list and all that stuff. And a lot of times what you're doing is kind of timely information what you can offer. So I apologize, didn't wanna give you the short end of the stick there, buddy, but we got some really good stuff going on in the last week. How about it?
Speaker 3 00:01:52 Yeah, it's been amazing <laugh>, lots of excitement in the markets, lots of excite, uh, excitement, you know, from a banking perspective. We can touch on that if you want. If any of your listeners have any curiosity into what's happening with the current state of affairs of the US banking system. And we talk a little bit of markets, talk a little bit about a safety and security and return on your money.
Speaker 2 00:02:15 Well, yeah, I think that's all really good stuff. And you know, I'm kind of a cynical guy as you know, and I see this stuff like, well took long enough. Obviously that was gonna happen. Everybody thinks banks are so damn safe. That's right. And then all of a sudden I read a, a headline, it was 44 hours it took for it to collapse and it's like somebody had to know about it at the time. Right. <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:02:38 So a 15th largest bank in the United States, second largest bank failure in history, over 200 billion in deposits of a bank, Silicon Valley Bank based in Santa Clara, mostly servicing the, uh, technology. But they actually had a pretty broad range of business. I'm pretty surprised that all they're talking about is technology failed. They didn't open on Friday,
Speaker 2 00:03:03 So the stock didn't open. Right. And then we've got also, it's not just that the bank goes down, but all the other businesses that we're borrowing from the bank or using the bank for deposits are gonna be hammered. Is that correct?
Speaker 3 00:03:18 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what, what we saw Thursday was a real contagion effect. We saw First Republic Bank drop, uh, over 30%. We saw Signature Bank of New York that was down over, you know, 25, 30%. In fact, the regulators two day in New York shut that bank down for fear of systemic collapse.
Speaker 2 00:03:38 What is today, John? Clear it up.
Speaker 3 00:03:41 Today is Sunday, March 12th.
Speaker 2 00:03:43 Yeah, so we're recording this about four days before it comes out, two days after the big news came out. Just so everybody knows that they're working on weekends to get this done, right?
Speaker 3 00:03:53 Yeah, I think the Fed and, uh, Janet Yellen and the regulators really had to, you know, work double time on this. So Silicon Valley Bank no longer exists as it states. Assets still be bought up. Signature Bank was just closed. Today you're talking about people in LA here were lining up at First Republic Bank, which is a, a boutique bank that serves high net worth individuals and businesses. There's video servicing online of people lining up at that bank. And that's typically, you know, a 250 to $500,000 minimum to open an account there. You just had a pack West, which is a small regional bank here in Southern California, lose 60% of its value on Thursday and Friday. So there was a lot, lot of craziness going on and it's uh, you know, really kind of flashed me back to Lehman Brothers in 2008 where it was there one day and gone the next. So
Speaker 2 00:04:48 It's funny you say that, John, because I was reading articles this morning to get, you know, kind of prepped for what we're gonna talk about. And then I talked to my Wall Street Insider somewhat the guy that knows things. And I found an article on Bloomberg about Lehman Brothers where it's funny, the bank collapsed and there's a few dudes that are still working for the bank because they've got, they continue to have loans, they've got assets and there's a few people that need to stick around and manage that. But it, you know, it's a half a dozen guys or something like that, that are still kind of like unwinding the bank even what, eight or 15 years later? Something like that.
Speaker 3 00:05:24 I wouldn't doubt it. I wouldn't doubt it. It's the dramatic collapse of this bank was, you know, it was just proper, you know, I mean this really kind of can be applied to, to the, uh, the regular everyday retirement investor. You have to have proper risk management in place. And the bank, they didn't have a chief risk officer for almost eight months while they tripled their deposits over the last three or four years. Uh, and it was just a mismanagement of their funds. They took a, a very large bet on some government securities that as rates rise unprecedented over the last 12 months, they got caught on the wrong side of the trade and they just didn't manage risk very well. And so it kind of really comes back to what you and I do for our clients is managing risk.
Speaker 2 00:06:15 Can you imagine what would've happened, John, if this was an insurance company or a series of insurance companies, cuz it was Silicon Valley Bank and then it's a few other ones that you mentioned are gonna be, and and I, uh, the fallouts enormous and it's gonna keep cascading for a while. Can you imagine if it was a handful of the biggest insurance companies, what people would be saying,
Speaker 3 00:06:40 Oh, it would be total chaos, I believe that
Speaker 2 00:06:44 And then everybody's gonna still go by, oh buy cd cuz banks are safe, right?
Speaker 3 00:06:48 Yeah, you know, the sad part, we can talk about reserve requirements, but you know, you talk about F D I C insurance and they raised it from a hundred thousand to 250,000 after the great financial crisis. But you, you really have to talk about the, your bank, your regular old bank, whether it be a money center bank like JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America, or your local, you know, a lot of the deposits across the country are held by, you know, regional and community banks, banks that are in your town. And they take those deposits and they rely on that deposit base to go out to the Fed and make loans. So they might keep 10 cents on the dollar on deposit for you in your account versus an insurance company, Brian, you can really touch on their reserve requirements. It's much more stringent.
Speaker 2 00:07:36 Oh yeah. It's, it's essentially one to one, right? It's in excess of $1 of assets for every dollar of liabilities. It's not even the same thing. It's totally different. And what I've said to a lot of people is like, you put your, if you want to be safe, especially now, cuz there's a lot of headwinds economically aside from this. Correct? We got the stock market that's kind of flat for a couple years. There was a nice rally at the beginning of the year. Everybody thinks, oh no, market's going, oh well no, it's coming down. We're not even close to being done. And nobody that I've talked to thinks that oh yeah, a real optimistic future. Even short term, more long term, what's gonna happen. There's a lot of economic headwinds even without the banking issues that we saw last week. And I, so I've always said like, do you wanna be safe? You put your money in companies that have money, insurance companies are the only ones that have money. The rest of 'em are just leveraged to the hilt.
Speaker 3 00:08:29 Yeah, I, I would agree. And this particular bank was leveraged back in 2006 and 2007. I actually worked at a late stage venture capital investment bank prior to joining BlackRock. And the one thing that that we found in dealing with Silicon Valley Bank, I mean this is not a flyby night institution, they've been around for 20, 30 years. But we found that a lot of the companies that we worked with, they were required to bank based on any loans that they received from Silicon Valley Bank, their venture capital, uh, partners who were funding these operations of these companies that were hoping to go public. They were tied at the hip with Silicon Valley Bank. I mean literally you had to keep all of your money there. So that means payroll, your credit line, your 401k, your wealth management for their executives. They had a real niche and they had a real kind of stronghold on that particular market. And they've grown and grown and grown as, you know, more and more companies in Silicon Valley are, you know, startups and more funding has been allocated to venture capital. It's, it's just been crazy growth and they improperly manage risk and now they're no longer in business.
Speaker 2 00:09:44 Right. <laugh> my how things change, right. How quickly they change.
Speaker 3 00:09:49 Absolutely. You know what a thing, what an event like this really does is, you know, when you think about the banking system in United States, sure we've got a lot of backstops, but it's, it's a confidence game. And if us consumers or depositors don't have confidence in their banks, you know, it could destroy the whole system. We, you know, we are based on a confidence type of system. You get people lining up on a Saturday, taking their money out of the bank. I mean, real fear starts to grip people. There was, uh, rumors last night about Charles Schwab bank. I don't think that they're true and obviously just a rumor, but you know, people were talking about the, the solvency of the banking arm of Charles Schwab. Some real contagion could have happened. I know the Fed just stepped in. They said that they were going to backstop a hundred percent of the deposits that exceeded the F D I C threshold of 250. I mean I have a, a friend of mine is actually the chief accounting officer at Roku. Roku is, you know, reported to have over 500 billion, 500 million at Silicon Valley Bank. That's uninsured. Hopefully the Fed follows through or the banking system and they make all those people whole. I mean you'd hate to see people get hurt, but are we looking at another bank bailout? I don't know. Is it warranted?
Speaker 2 00:11:13 Yeah, well that's what one, one thing I read cuz right before we recorded this, my guy in New York sent me the treasury release basically saying they're gonna make sure that depositors your everyday people are, but the unsecured creditors are not protected. And essentially it was kind of like, I think individuals were insured but businesses were not. Is how I read that. Does that sound about right?
Speaker 3 00:11:39 Uh, I haven't read the releases, they just came out. I know that, uh, they're running some stuff nonstop. But I was mostly listening to what potentially could happen last night and all, most of all day yesterday it kind of consumed <laugh> my whole day. And I know that some news has come out, which is, it's interesting because you know, had they not come out, stock market would have completely crashed. And it looks like futures are pointing to the positive, which is good and if a sigh relief. But you know, we can kind of talk about what's gone on in the market in the last, the first quarter since the beginning of the year. It seemed like we just completely pivot and we had this race up first couple months of the year and then, uh, we've kind of given a lot of that back. We can talk about that if you'd like. I can show you some charts.
Speaker 2 00:12:28 I think that's a great idea John. And in light of what's happened that kind of like, you know, recent events got us together today. If you're willing to, I know everybody would love to hear you talk about what you think. You've got your own clients that have been, I guess resistant to your analysis in some ways, right? Uh, risk management, cuz that's what we're talking about. Risk management, something you're very good at and since I've known you, it's not been a really great time to be an investor. It's kind of up and down and flat most of the way to be honest with you. So whatever you can share with our listeners, everybody would certainly appreciate that. And then of course I'm gonna add my commentary along the way cause I like to do that <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:13:07 Sure, yeah. You know, we've seen inflation cool off a little bit. Uh, we've seen the dollar lose some of its strength. I mean the dollar had really rallied last year, which was really tough for the markets. We saw rates continue to spike and as we, you know, in the beginning of the year, I, I would say going back to October, we started a almost a, you know, I wanna say a mini bull market run. We had a pretty strong go from October, I would say, you know, traded size sideways in November, popped up in December and then just really ran January and February really ran pretty hard in the market. And uh, you know, I was, maybe I was caught flatfooted. I I think a lot of investors were, you know, they were getting nervous that they were missing out on returns and you know, I just don't think it's over.
Speaker 3 00:13:57 I think the long term is, uh, we go lower because of what you talked about, a lot of the economic headwinds. And I can share a chart and show, you know, we had a classic bull trap in the s and p 500 where we had this massive rip up in January to the upside and we've pretty much given most of that back. So I could share a chart or two with you if you'd like, kind show you what I'm talking about. And then if you have questions or your listeners have questions, obviously they know where to find you and you can always have a chat.
Speaker 2 00:14:29 And yeah, why don't you do that because I think everybody would like it. And it's my opportunity to say you're not allowed to reach out to John Ballmer. He's not here to advertise for services Course. The dishonest people will sneak around and go search him and find him and pretend that they just ran into him, which is okay, hell of a good dude. If you wanna talk to him, you call me first. I'll qualify you a little bit cuz he doesn't need to be wasting his time. And that's how we do it here. So why don't you let us know what we're looking at, John.
Speaker 3 00:15:02 Yeah, so this is the, uh, the daily chart of the s and p 500. I'm just gonna take it back. Zoom in. In fact, to October we, we saw those October lows and you can kind of see that we started to form a new channel here. Really kind of gave some back in December pretty significantly. But again, a lot of that was due to hitting this red line. And if I, uh, can make it a little bit thicker, you can see this red line. This is the long-term downward trend. If we're taking a look at it, this is this January 4th, 2022 up here you have these peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys. But you can see it was not until late January that we actually broke through that downward trend. And that's a good thing. But you can see this red, skinny red line here. That's the 200 day moving average.
Speaker 3 00:15:54 It's a key indicator that I look at a lot and, and I'm more of a, uh, a technical trader, technical analyst than I, more so than I am a fundamental. We do keep a good eye on the macroeconomic environment and the fundamentals of the market. But a lot of this is technical trading. And as you can see, you had a low here in October, then you had a, uh, high here, bounced off here, but then you, this is what I really kind of look at. You had a a higher low here in this yellow from a technical standpoint, I didn't breach my October low. So that kind of gives me an area of interest. And you had a lot of congestion in there and I can kind of zoom in on it for you here. You had a lot of this back and forth congestion, right?
Speaker 3 00:16:41 Anywhere between, you know, 3 76 and, and 3 85 on the s and p 500 or the spy, which is the s and p, the spider ETF that mimics the s and p 500 lot of congestion, didn't really know where we wanted to go. And then you had a little bit of good news rates kind of backed off and you just have this January where we started taking off to the upside and this is where people got caught flatfooted, maybe we had a little bit too much cash, but you know, my long term outlook is something like this. And you can kind of see on that line because you still have a declining 200 day moving average. And we have a, uh, we have a classic bolt trap. We went above that indicator or that long-term trend line, we traded sideways and we've pretty much failed here.
Speaker 3 00:17:31 So now we have a, a new high, we have a higher low, but now we've failed to breach this high. And so now you can see that we're, you know, last week was pretty brutal. We had, you know, four down days of the week and these are pretty strong downward candles, let alone we've got a banking crisis right now. So, you know, the market will probably pop up, maybe test this area right here and then I would say maybe, you know, it'll trend down over just due to the headwinds. I could be wrong, but that's kind of how I'm playing my cards. I know I have a lot of clients that were, they really wanted to be in the market and they were not necessarily worried about more downside. And, and, and that's okay if we wanna put them in the market, that's up to them and it's their risk tolerance and they can look out. But you know, for those clients that are a little bit more concerned with what's going on the big picture, I still think that there's opportunities to get, uh, in at a better price. I'll kind of leave it at that. We'll just keep it simple. No,
Speaker 2 00:18:34 It's a classic case. I don't know everybody, uh, you must be taking a bunch of heat I suppose for, you know, missing out on some of the little things. But you know what I say, classic case of like it's, you want, everybody wants to think they're in it for the long-term, but they let short-term events dictate their like short-term events cause you know, emotional reactions to certain things.
Speaker 3 00:18:57 Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I see I have a lot of conversations with people who might be sitting on 10 or 20% cash and we've been putting it to work over time strategically. And you had a, a couple days last week where people were just absolutely panicked thinking this is the last time that they were gonna get in at the lows. And unfortunately I just, you know, my sentiment is I don't think that's the case. I think we're gonna see potentially, and I don't know whether it's now or in two years, but I would say, I'm just gonna share this again, Brian. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:19:35 Go ahead.
Speaker 3 00:19:36 Unless something dramatically changes, I would say my long-term forecast of the market looks something like this and here's your covid low right here
Speaker 2 00:19:45 Going bold, making it public. You okay with me publishing this on Thursday?
Speaker 3 00:19:50 Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I could be completely wrong. That's why, you know, a lot of people are still gonna be invested in the market, but we're gonna have some dry powder to where if we start to trade down this area, and maybe I'm wrong, you have a really, really strong area of resistance right here or support right there at that red line. That's the covid high pre covid high. You know, you got kind of got really close to down, down there in October. You know, you could get back down there again for sure. Uh, you could get down to the 3,400 level, the 3,600 level. It's not outta the question did we break that? Got a lot of area to go, but it's possible,
Speaker 2 00:20:30 Right?
Speaker 3 00:20:31 Or it could happen in the next recession. I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the definition of recession is anymore.
Speaker 2 00:20:37 Well, everybody likes to talk about, you know, I did my, you know, you weren't involved in this John, but I did my little podcast about Ken Fisher and they talk about, oh, over time the stock market always goes up. You know, you take out the a hundred best days in the market and you get next to nothing. But we've had some really big years, we've had a lot of volatility in the past 20 years where we've had giant losses, great bull runs following that. And I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of our clients, a lot of people we talk to, you know, certainly anybody under the age of 60 doesn't really remember the years of stagnation in the seventies. There have been long periods of time where the stock market doesn't really do anything right.
Speaker 3 00:21:19 Right, absolutely.
Speaker 2 00:21:20 And so this whole bull market run is a fairly recent phenomena in the last 20, 30 years where you just get old markets and oh, the market corrects and it's gonna bounce right back and go higher. If you look at the long term charts, it's like that's kind of, that's pretty recent with respect to a lot of things. So
Speaker 3 00:21:41 I mean, I, I can show you the long-term chart if, if you're interested as well.
Speaker 2 00:21:46 Yeah, well we can always do that later. We don't have to do it all Now, whatever you think is interesting to people, John.
Speaker 3 00:21:53 Well, if I look at it and I, I'll just share it one more time.
Speaker 2 00:21:57 Okay.
Speaker 3 00:21:58 You can see right here, this is a long-term chart of the s and p and you can see this is your 2000 peak. You can see the market traded in this range. That was a lost decade. You literally did not make any money. You got chopped up a lot.
Speaker 2 00:22:17 Yeah. That's a 10 year period.
Speaker 3 00:22:19 Yeah. This was really your primary uptrend, your bull market, and you had a little chop in there along the way. You had a little flat to down 2015, 2016, you had a, uh, the fed tried to raise rates in 2018. You had that December sell off that's projected right here. And you obviously had covid. I wouldn't consider that a recession at all. I just think, you know, that was a pandemic, but you know, we ripped higher. But if you take a look at the market, look at all this chop right here, and if you're an investor right now in this and you think that this latest rally is the start of a new bull market, you know, you've gotta think twice. And I I this is the weekly chart,
Speaker 2 00:23:05 So back, back out again, just so we can see all that. Cuz this is what I've been talking about for a long time. Right. And if you look at Yeah, that's, no, it's, well, whatever, like the entire exponential curve in the stock market happened in the last 30 years. All of it.
Speaker 3 00:23:19 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:23:20 Right? And then if you look at like the last year and a and three months, which is, you know, the top top and then all that chop you were talking about. I mean, if you compare even the lowest point in that top to the beginning point, it's insane. Like all the yield, I mean is the yield behind us or are we gonna have you think it's gonna keep going, huh? Yeah, I mean like, like a chart is a living, breathing thing, correct?
Speaker 3 00:23:47 Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2 00:23:49 Well, you, you can read the chart and understand how it goes, but everything is right in that area and so many people are resistant to like protecting money and selling out. Oh well cuz we're off the highs. It's like look how much higher it is. Which is again, why I said to people, a lot of people that are retiring now, you have more money than you've ever had and the stock market's higher than it's ever been. And I'll still say that because look at the, we're off the top and it still doesn't make a dent in the climb we've had in the last 20 years.
Speaker 3 00:24:19 Yeah, absolutely. I mean I could, I could certainly illustrate that for you. From the bottom in 2008 to the peak, the market was up 658%.
Speaker 2 00:24:31 So the bottom in 2008 to where it's at now, what's that
Speaker 3 00:24:34 To where it is now? It is, uh, it's you're still at uh, 515%.
Speaker 2 00:24:41 Yeah. In 15 years.
Speaker 3 00:24:42 In 15 years. Pretty dang good rate of return. The problem is, is that not everyone gets in at the top. Not everyone gets in at the bottom. And so, I mean if you just, if I just draw it from here, you know, at the low, the s and p was down 27% over the last year. That's the drawdown. We're still 19% off the high. Should we go down to the covid low? Which I think long term, you know, you're uh, 50% off the high.
Speaker 2 00:25:16 Mm-hmm <affirmative>,
Speaker 3 00:25:17 It's pretty significant. So who knows if that's gonna happen. I mean, we're not here to make predictions. No one has a crystal ball. But you know, it's all, it all comes back to proper risk management. And this is something that you and I always talk about. Always talk about proper risk management in a portfolio. Whether you're investing in stocks or bonds or whether you like annuities or cash or real estate. You have to always, always have proper risk management.
Speaker 2 00:25:48 That's all we do. I can tell you all my clients who bought annuities 20 years ago aren't worried about this crap right now. We, uh, John, you and I do different things, but we work together because I believe that there needs to be equity exposure for upside growth, but you need to do it in the right way. And you also understand the value of annuities in a portfolio. So that's why we work together. Well anyway, I appreciate you coming by today to explain some of these things to us and chat about, uh, the bank failures.
Speaker 3 00:26:17 Yeah, Brian, y y you know, it's funny, I was just just thinking had that bank 21 billion in annuity, just putting it in the 10 year treasury, they would still be around today.
Speaker 2 00:26:30 We wouldn't even be talking about it. Yeah. So there's a lesson, although that was 21 billion in most of our clients. Well none of my clients have that much, but annuities do help in retirement if you wanna stay around the, out of the mess. That's the thing. You got an annuity right now. Yeah. Forget about it. Right? Don't worry about it. But hopefully you're not one of those guys lined up outside the bank trying to get your money outing for the F D I C insurance is inflationary by the way because the only reason the banks are protected is cuz the federal government prints more money to bail you out. That's a problem. I'm fundamentally opposed to CDs in retirement. Everybody's gotta have a bank for some savings account and some money they can get at real quickly with proper planning. You don't need that to any larger extent, but uh, that's just my opinion. So take it for what it's worth.
Speaker 3 00:27:21 Absolutely. Brian, good subject today. I appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 2 00:27:26 Yeah, no, thanks for being back. So everybody, thank you for joining us for episode 80 Annuity Straight Talk podcast, bank Failures Market update with John Bomber. Been great. I'll be down to see John here in a few weeks, so yeah,
Speaker 3 00:27:39 Just less than a month. Looking forward to seeing you.
Speaker 2 00:27:43 I'm headed on my road trip, the annuity straight talk road trip leaving tomorrow and I'll be on the road when this comes out. So anyway, everybody, if you want to, uh, get ahold of me, if you wanna talk to John, you gotta talk to me. So you call me at (800) 438-5121. Schedule a call with me. Top right corner says schedule a call any page on annuity, straight talk.com, subscribe, like, comment, follow, podcast, share them if you, uh, wanna get this to your friends and tell everybody about it. But anyway, thank you again for, uh, joining us for episode number 80. We will see you next week with, uh, episode 81. Okay, bye.
Speaker 1 00:28:33 An talk. The proceeding information is for information and educational purposes only. Does not represent tax, legal, or investment advice. The views expressed by guests on program are own and do not necessarily reflect the partners. No information presented today should be acted apart without meeting with qualified licensed professional. Its important disclosures.
