Alabama's Morning News with JT
Jay Ratliff on how markets will react to Biden stepping aside and airline schedules after last week's outage
An official message from Medicare. A new law is helping me save more money on prescription drug costs. You may be able to save, too. With Medicare's Extra Help program, my premium is zero, and my out-of-pocket costs are low. Who should apply? Single people making less than $23,000 a year, or married couples who make less than $31,000 a year. Even if you don't think you qualify, it pays to find out. Go to ssa.gov/extrahelp, paid for by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Jay Radcliffe joins us now from daytradefund.com. Oh, Jay, welcome back in. What a difference a day makes in our world these days. I'm telling you, you don't talk for a day or two, and it just all breaks, right? It's unbelievable. And I'm afraid the news cycle is going to be this crazy from now until the election. I think every week we're going to get something that's like, "Are you kidding me? Breaking news? Another one?" I mean, you better get on the treadmill, get in shape, I think, for this. Well, all I know is I'm glad because I have a sister that's big-time liberal that I can snoozer for 30 days. Yeah, my sister's a lib, too, and she's kind of fun. You know, we've gotten to the point in our conversations that if it gets too crazy, we just change the subject to football and, you know, go get a cold beer and go hang out on the deck and stop talking. And my sister's pretty good with that, but, like, so many people on that side, when you start talking about let's discuss policies, actions, those kinds of things, well, that's one that the names start coming out. Well, this person's a narcissist. This person's like, "Hey, take that in a minute. Let's just talk about policies." And when they start talking about time for a good female leader, I said, "I totally agree. Margaret Thatcher was incredible. I'd love to have plenty of her," and that tends to shut them down pretty quick because they don't want to say Margaret Thatcher was a good female leader. All right, let's talk about what's going on with the market with all the crazy chaos going on. Biden stepping down. You've got the situation with the Secret Service. Markets reacting on this, or, as we've talked before, do they just look at it and go, "Yeah, let's keep moving." Now, there have been some actions. What happened was, after the assassination attempt, it looked okay. That plus the debate debacle that gave Trump a pretty decisive lead in the thought process of many people on Wall Street. And we started to see the energy stocks start to ramp up quite a bit, as more people were putting money into those and other types of things that before were very pro-business, pro-Trump based on his time in office before. Because we've got the blueprint. We know what he did. These aren't political promises. We know what this man, his president, did. And then when Biden stepped back and stepped down, and Harris was kind of the coronation to put her at the top, the thought was, "Okay, now there's some uncertainty. Now we're not so sure," where President Biden could have easily handled, in their opinion. And I totally agree, President Biden, without all of his faculties, you now have the unknown of, "Okay, how close is this particular race going to be?" So there's some uncertainty, and there will continue to be some for a period of time. And I suspect, leading between now and the election, J.T., what we're going to see is a lot of ebbs and flows, where it might be that, "Okay, it becomes clear that Donald Trump is going to kind of pull ahead, or if it's going to be closer than a lot of people think, the market's going to have this uncertainty as far as which way things are going to go." And we have the same thing with Hillary Clinton and Trump, because when it looked like she was going to win, we had a lot of individuals leading up to that election in 2016, where the ammunition stocks and the gun stocks were going up, because a lot of people were stocking up on something. They thought they were going to have a hard time acquiring it, she in fact had ever become president. Yeah, I think it's too early to tell where everybody stands on all of this. I mean, it's just happening right before our very eyes. So we'll watch polling numbers as well, and get some more reaction down the road for sure. We'll be talking about this all the way to November 5th. Let's talk about the latest on maybe a right cut in September. Are we leaning that way? You know, the Fed Chair last week said, "You know, we don't have to be fully at 2 percent, "first to start throttling back and considering the rate cuts." Well, that's all the Wall Street had to hear. And it was Snoopy Dance time, market shot back up over 40,000. And yeah, a lot of people are saying, "Okay, here we come." In fact, they're so excited. They're saying, "You know, instead of a quarter point interest rate cut, "we might have a 50 basis point. "It may be doubled, but I mean, they're just losing their minds "because they're finally looking at the possibility "of getting an interest rate cut." I hope it happens in September. My concern, of course, even those 70, 75 percent of the people who think it's a done deal, is that we still have some economic data, inflationary data, some jobs data that is going to be released between now and the time that decisions made. And if Jerome Powell and the people that work with him do not see the numbers they're looking for, well, we're going to continue to see a pause. Or if the numbers were really bad, we would end up looking at perhaps an interest rate increase, which I don't think likely, but it's still on the table and it's there just in case. All right, you spent years in the airline industry and you want to get your thoughts on the breakdown of not only the airline industry, but so many others. I mean, we had trouble with phones and I think banks had some problems with the meltdown and Microsoft, but Delta seemed to continue to linger with issues because they have an internal situation involving software as far as finding crew. Are the airlines back on schedule and moving again? Well, first of all, Southwest didn't have any issue whatsoever, zero because their computers are 34 years old. They were too old for the updates. So they weren't for a change, five. Every other airline had about two days of absolute chaos and then they got back on track. Delta did not. Delta's had like five or 6,000 flights canceled over the last several days. They have canceled over the weekend, they canceled more flights than they normally do in the course of a year. And Delta is just, I mean, they're normally on top of everything with this, but their crew scheduling computer system isn't keeping up with a lot of these last minute additions and corrections and changes. Okay, and that's what's caused them now. As of yesterday, I think the total number of flights canceled was 511, but they had 1,661 delayed flights. So 66 or 60% of their flight operations affected as of yesterday. Today's a little better, but you have 500,000 people that have been displaced. And every flight being as full as it is, where are you gonna put a half a million people to try to get them to their destination? And that's why we're having these sad pictures of people that have been stuck at airports for days as they desperately try to reach their destination. - Well, silver lining, the hotel industry is kind of happy about it anyway. Sorry, Jay Rattler. - An official message from Medicare. - A new law is helping me save more money on prescription drug costs. You may be able to save too. With Medicare's extra help program, my premium is zero and my out-of-pocket costs are low. Who should apply? Single people making less than $23,000 a year or a married couples who make less than $31,000 a year. Even if you don't think you qualify, it pays to find out. - Go to ssa.gov/extrahelp, paid for by the US Department of Health and Human Services.