Category: Blog

How Will Uncertain Inflation Outlook Impact Stock Market?

How Will Uncertain Inflation Outlook Impact Stock Market?The June 16 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting Q&A session with Chairman Jay Powell and recent comments from The Fed have signaled two potential inflation rate hikes in 2023. Two days later, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, signaled there could be a rate hike as soon as 2022. With these mixed signals and upcoming FOMC meetings, how might inflation and the markets play out in 2021?

Inflation and the Dollar

One explanation for inflation is that there are too many dollars chasing too few goods – or more simply put, things will cost more over time. Say you can purchase a pair of shoes for $100. Then, inflation is 3 percent over the course of a year, making them cost $103 after one year.

This example illustrates when the cost of things – including school, housing, clothes, food, energy, etc. – increases according to the Consumer Price Index or CPI, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines it.

Some Factors Impacting Inflation

One of the Federal Reserve’s dual mandates is price stability. There are three ways The Fed can steer inflation.

The first is by adjusting the Federal Funds Rate, which determines how much banks pay for overnight borrowing from a “depositary institution,” such as the Federal Reserve Bank. By raising this rate, it lowers spending and helps reduce the likelihood of inflation by tamping down costs, along with pushing up interest rates for lenders.

Another tool is the Fed increasing its Reserve Requirement. By increasing this metric, it slows down spending, and therefore inflation by how much money institutions can lend out.

The third is through open-market operations (OMO), whereby the Fed can either buy U.S. Treasury Bonds to increase the supply of money or sell U.S. Treasury Bonds to decrease the money supply.

The Fed uses the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Index from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, along with the Depart of Labor’s Consumer Price and Producer Price indexes, to gauge inflation.

Understanding Cost-Push Inflation

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, there are a few ways to quantify inflation. Cost-push inflation happens when inputs necessary for manufacturing cost more. This can include input resources that cost more or worker pay that rises quickly. During the energy price spike during the 1970s, the increased cost of fossil fuel increased production and commercial hauling costs.

Wage-Push Inflation

According to the Monthly Labor Review, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Bulletin and the American Economic Association, wage-push inflation is the “thesis” that argues employee pay has risen faster than actual good or service output and is squeezing profitability and price attractiveness to consumers.

One reason this occurs is due to a minimum wage mandate. Another reason is to attract better workers or increase their applicant pool. It’s important to know that doing so will increase the money supply in the economy, which will help them purchase more and create a higher demand for goods. This will further increase the price of goods, whereby businesses will charge more for goods to pay higher wages, which will increase the price of goods throughout the economy. It’s all about balancing the wage increases versus the cost of goods.

Demand-Pull Inflation

Demand-pull inflation happens when there’s the classic too much demand but too little supply scenario. It’s often accompanied by an increase in money supply by a loose central bank monetary policy, oftentimes leading to higher prices.

Looking to Commodities

Taking energy, specifically West Texas Intermediate Spot price, due to increasing costs of energy, this sector is projected to do well in an inflationary scenario. Looking at data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the price per barrel increased from nearly $45 on Jan. 1 to more than $59 on April 9, to more than $71.55 on June 18 and climbing. Be it stocks, options or futures, investors who took positions earlier in 2021 or 2020 likely benefitted from inflation.

Performance May Vary by Asset

However, it’s important to select the right assets to decrease the likelihood of losses and increase the chances of gains. For example, fixed income, in conjunction with higher interest rates, is likely to decline due to not staying competitive with inflation rates. Using the “discounted cash-flow method” to evaluate a stock, especially in periods of higher interest rates, growth stocks fare worse compared to their value counterparts. When investing in dividend paying stocks, these may provide a hedge against inflation because they oftentimes can pass on higher costs for their products, keeping their earnings in line with growth expectations, along with receiving dividends themselves.

While the future of the market can’t be predicted, paying attention to how the economy reopens and the Fed manages inflation can help determine what investments are the best going forward.

Wishing on a Star: Investors Pour Billions in to SPACs

Wishing on a Star: Investors Pour Billions in to SPACsA SPAC is a special purpose acquisition company. It is typically sponsored by a venture capitalist or a private equity firm that has expertise in a specific sector or industry, such as green technology. A SPAC launches as an IPO, but it is nothing more than a shell company that raises money from investors. Post-IPO, it has a limited amount of time (one to two years) to merge with an existing company, where the capitol is deployed. Once that happens, the private operating company trades publicly under the SPAC name.

While SPACs have been around for about 30 years, they’ve only become popular in the past year or so. In fact, this year investors have already poured more than $100 billion into these vehicles, and that’s more than the total amount raised since they were first introduced. SPACs offer investors the opportunity to buy into a startup, which might be at early-, middle- or late-stage development when it partners with the SPAC. In 2020 and 2021, industries heavily represented by SPACs include electric vehicles, consumer-oriented technology, communications and retail.

What makes the SPAC particularly interesting is that investors do not know what company they are buying into since the entity has no commercial operations of its own. As such, they are sold largely based on trust in the management sponsor and belief in the growth potential for the industry it represents.

SPACs differ from traditional IPOs in that the IPO price is not based on the valuation of an existing business. Instead, investors typically pay $10 per common share of regular stock at the initial offering. These shares are referred to as units. Each unit also includes a warrant, which offers the right to purchase the company’s stock at a specific price and at a later date. Once a SPAC merges with a private company, the shares and warrants are listed and publicly traded on the stock exchange. Capital raised by the sale of warrants is typically used to compensate the SPAC sponsor.

One of the appeals of the SPAC model is that individual investors have the opportunity to invest in a startup that has been vetted and funded by an experienced private equity partner. This presents less risk as well as a ground-floor opportunity that is usually not feasible for individual investors. Most IPO opportunities require higher capital investments and occur at a later stage of development. SPACs provide the opportunity to commit a smaller investment at an earlier stage in a company’s life cycle, which often offers the potential for higher returns.

Unfortunately, the lack of a longer, established track record also increases risk – which is something the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently scrutinizing. For now, the SEC has taken a hands-off approach, hoping the market will regulate itself. However, if SPAC sponsors oversell the entity’s capabilities or investors become disillusioned with the returns on their investment, the SPAC market may be subject to considerable regulation in the future.

As for investment returns, the outcomes are mixed. Initial SPAC IPOs tend to outperform the S&P 500. However, once SPACs merge with their respective private companies, the results tend to be less impressive. Given their recent surge in popularity, there’s no way to gauge their long-term performance success. 

5 Tips for Going Back to the Office

5 Tips for Going Back to the OfficeSlowly, our world is changing. A percentage of the population has been vaccinated and many employees are headed back to the office. However, this may cause a bit of anxiety – and understandably so. Here are few ways to help take the edge off of returning to the workplace.

Wake up Earlier

For some of you, working from home might have caused you to shift your office hours. Maybe you’re starting later and staying up later. Whatever your routine, it’s safe to say that generally, office hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. A few days, perhaps a week, before you expect to go back, set your alarm earlier. Each day, baby step it back a few minutes to the time you roused yourself before the shutdown began. Though things might never be the same, at least your re-entry into the work world might feel somewhat familiar.

Prepare the Night Before Your First Day

Along with starting your day earlier, think through everything you need to take with you. Do you drink coffee? Make sure you have a thermos with a hot cup of joe ready to go. Do you eat lunch at work? Make your lunch the night before; or if you prefer microwavable meals, be sure you’ve got all your favs ready to pop into your work bag. Ensuring that you will have sustenance at whatever time you lunch will save you a lot of worry.

Review Your Workplace Protocols

Here we’re talking about rules to keep you safe. Do you need a mask if you’ve been vaccinated? What if you haven’t been vaccinated? Do you need to always wear a mask? Will there be hand sanitizer onsite or do you need to bring your own? Email HR or leadership to be fully aware of the policy so you can keep up-to-date with any changes. Staying informed will help calm your nerves.

Manage Your Stress

Make sure you’re being mindful of how you’re feeling emotionally before, during, and after you return to work. If you’re dealing with anxiety when you’re back at work, practice self-care. Take a walk outside during lunch to get some fresh air. If you like to exercise and your gym is open, plan a quick workout. If for some reason you can’t leave the office, try meditation apps like Calm, Headspace or Simple Habit. (These are also great when you get home and before you go to bed – anytime, actually.) You might also call a friend or family member and share how you’re feeling. Letting off some steam and expressing yourself helps alleviate some of the pressure that might be building up.

Communicate with Your Team

Making the transition back to the office can be challenging, if not downright tough. To diffuse any misunderstandings, practice transparency with everyone, no matter what their position. If you’re a manager, lay out your expectations so that everyone is on the same page. If you’re an individual contributor, make sure your manager and peers know what you’re working on, your hours, and any out-of-the-office days you have coming up. Many companies are asking employees, initially, to split their time between the office and home, which means that for some a full transition back to the office is yet to come. Regardless, overcommunicating will ensure you don’t miss out on anything important.

We may never return to the days before the pandemic. However, we’re making strides to get back to a place of normalcy and are here to guide you every step of the way.

Sources

Returning To Work In The Office? 5 Tips To Prepare For The Transition

Audits in Accounting: Improving Audit Quality with Data Analytics

Audits in Accounting: Improving Audit Quality with Data AnalyticsAuditing is crucial to ensure the accuracy and fairness of financial information. However, one of the biggest threats to audit reputation today is data quality. This is because of the large volumes of data that businesses produce today. To deal with so much data, auditors are now turning to data analytics.

Data Analytics and Audits

Technology has played a major role in business growth as it aids in reducing operational costs and improving customer service. As such, many businesses have adopted enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. These systems result in huge volumes of data, making it nearly impossible to analyze using the traditional audit process.

Auditors are left with no choice but to also use IT-based solutions; and this led to the development of audit software to support the auditors in data extraction and analysis.

To further enhance the workings of audit software, it’s now being integrated with data analytics. Given that data analytics works with structured data, the systems incorporate machine learning (deep learning) to extract useful data from a host of unstructured data.

Although these developments in the audit profession have not changed the primary role of auditors, they have changed how an audit is done by helping produce high quality audit evidence.

How Data Analytics Improves Audit Quality

Traditional audits involve combing through piles of data, which is time consuming. As a result, auditors prefer workarounds like data sampling, which does not give a true outcome.

With data analytics, an auditor does not have to restrict data to financial reporting systems only. Instead, they can use data from multiple complete data sets, such as sales statistical data and employee and customer master data. This enables an auditor to go beyond traditional audits that target limited data and include different audit relevant data.

Using data analytics tools, auditors look for predefined patterns that help reveal ambiguous relationships between variables that a manual system might not identify. This helps facilitate a more comprehensive decision that includes all data sets.

By integrating data analytics, auditors have access to a powerful tool that helps them better understand a business. As a result, they can easily identify key audit risks, provide deeper insights into a business’ systems and controls, detect fraud, and provide value in a less costly manner.

Apart from simplifying and speeding up the audit process, data analytics also enables auditors to focus on key risks.

The capabilities of data analytics continue to evolve to the point of automating the auditing process through advanced data analytics (ADA). This enables the automation of routine audit processes, allowing the auditors more time for matters that require professional judgment.

Challenges of Audit Data Analytics

Audit data analytics isn’t without a few challenges, one of which is data exchange between a business and an auditor, whether internal or external. This is in relation to different systems used in data collection. To handle this challenge, the AICPA introduced data standards to be used for data requests and to ensure production of standard reports from the ERP systems.

Another challenge is the integrity of data fed into the analytics systems, as this determines the quality of the end results. Systems used should be designed around collecting meaningful data. Auditors must also ensure that the conclusions fed into the systems are accurate and correct.  

Although data analytics reduces the sampling risk, it introduces the challenge of getting numerous exceptions, mostly referred to as outliers, that produce results outside audit expectations. This calls for auditors to investigate the exceptions/outliers to determine if they are errors or misstatements.

Conclusion

Integrating data analytics into the audit process greatly improves audit quality and credibility. With rapid advancements in technology, the capabilities of data analytics will continue to evolve, making auditing work even more efficient while maintaining high quality.

Although the adoption of data analytics is dependent on the size of a business, availability of skilled staff is also crucial. To remain relevant in a fast-changing environment, auditors need to advance their skills to effectively use the data analytics tools.

Recognizing the Abolishment of Slavery and Compensating Law Enforcement, Overseas Federal Employees and Disaster Relief Victims

Recognizing the Abolishment of Slavery and Compensating Law Enforcement, Overseas Federal Employees and Disaster Relief VictimsJuneteenth National Independence Day Act (S 475) – This bill authorizes Juneteenth National Independence Day on June 19 as a legal public holiday. The bill was introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) on Feb. 25. It was passed by both the House and the Senate on June 16 and signed into law by the president on June 17.

Protecting America’s First Responders Act (S 937) – This bill was introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on April 29. The legislation ensures that certain law enforcement and first responders who have become permanently and totally disabled as a result of personal injuries sustained in the line of duty have prompt access to specific payments and benefits. The bill passed in the Senate on June 10 and is currently under consideration in the House.

HAVANA Act of 2021 (S 1828) – This bill provides financial support and resources for American officials suffering from the so-called Havana Syndrome – a mysterious set of symptoms that first affected federal employees stationed in Cuba in 2016. The bill authorizes disability benefits to American personnel who have experienced qualifying anomalous health incidents while serving in other countries throughout the world. The legislation was introduced by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) on May 25 and passed in the Senate on June 8. It is currently under consideration in the House.

Preventing Disaster Revictimization Act (HR 539) – Introduced by Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO) on Jan. 28, this bill would prevent the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) from taking back disaster assistance funds that it mistakenly awarded to victims who applied for assistance in good faith. Under current law, FEMA can go back weeks, months or even years to seek repayment of funds in cases where the agency subsequently determined it mistakenly granted assistance, but no fraud was committed. This bill would require FEMA to waive that disaster relief debt. The legislation passed in the House on June 15 and is in the Senate for consideration.

United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (S 1260) – This bill establishes a Directorate for Technology and Innovation in the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the purpose of strengthening U.S. leadership in critical technologies. The legislation authorizes investments in research, development and manufacturing in key technology focus areas, such as artificial intelligence, high performance computing and innovation to support national security strategy. The Office of Science and Technology Policy is to develop an annual strategy for the federal government to improve national competitiveness in science and research, and help grow critical industries to generate jobs for the future. The bill was introduced by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on April 20 and passed in the Senate on June 8. It is currently under consideration in the House.