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Stocks were mixed Monday as investors closely monitored developments in Washington, DC. Larry Shover, D. Alexander Capital CIO and Tom Essaye, The Sevens Report Research Founder joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: I guess, just how does the market look at something like this because you have Robert Kaplan, Eric Rosengren now stepping down from the Fed, two hawkish presidents. How does the market react? How does the market read something like this?
TOM ESSAYE: I don't think it's going to have very much of a market reaction. I think this is more just sort of, it's a bit of a juicy storyline, right? I mean, Powell said this doesn't look good. And it obviously doesn't look good. You don't want a conflict of interest among Fed governors, not that I'm saying there was one. I'm just saying that the optics of this aren't great.
The market's going to look past this, though. I mean, in the end, Rosengren and Kaplan weren't going to be deciding what the Fed was going to do. They were more on the hawkish side of things. I mean, you could make the argument that maybe it makes the Fed slightly more dovish. But I don't think that's going to change the outlook for stocks. I think instead, this is just sort of poor optics at a time when the Fed is sort of being more and more viewed sort of from a political prism. It's just bad timing.
ADAM SHAPIRO: Tom, let's follow up on something that looks pretty good though, as you highlighted in the latest "Sevens Report." And that would be the price of copper. I mean, we're watching commodities kind of go all over the place, oil above 75, to at least WTI above $75 a barrel. And what's going on with copper? And what's that signaling to investors?
TOM ESSAYE: Well, we've had copper come in right over the last couple of weeks because we saw-- essentially, copper really trades as a proxy for China sentiment in the very short term. So we had all these problems with the Chinese economy, which are still ongoing, they're just not the market's focus anymore. And then the Evergrande issue last week, you really saw copper come in.
But it's held some support now. And it's starting to bounce back. I think that's generally positive for the global economy, for the outlook for the global economy. And really, what you're seeing is, across asset classes, the market adopt a pro-cyclical view, which means better growth in the future, higher inflation, higher bond yields. You're seeing that from commodities through to equities today.
SEANA SMITH: Larry, one of the outperformance in today's market was energy, oil up another 2%, its highest level that we've seen in about three years. We also got that bullish note out from Goldman saying that we could see oil hit $90 here by year end. What do you see, I guess, as the likelihood that oil could potentially reach that level or maybe even push slightly higher?