Motley Fool Money - The Market Just Got a Huge Warning Sign

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Costs are going up for consumers and producers, which may not be a trend that stops anytime soon. We discuss what’s driving the increases and how it may eventually cause some shocks in a highly valued stock market today. Travis Hoium, Tyler Crowe, and Lou Whiteman discuss: - Consumer price index (CPI) surge - Producer price index (PPI) surge - What higher inflation means for the market Companies discussed: Costco (COST), Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT). Host: Travis Hoium Guests: Tyler Crowe, and Lou Whiteman Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inflation is back, and Motley Fool, Hidden Jems Investing, starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool, Hidden Jems Investing. I'm Travis Hoham, joined today by Rachel Warren and our substitute for Lou Whiteman, Tyler Crow. Guys, we are going to talk a lot about inflation today, and before you think that this is going to be a boring episode, we are going to tie this to what this means to investing, because inflation is not all that fun. I don't like it where prices go up. I don't think anybody really does, but it really matters to. what's going to happen to the market. So we're going to try to piece all this together.

The thing that came out earlier this week, we'll get to PPI in just a second, but CPI came out earlier this week. That's the consumer price index. This is what you and I feel when we go to the grocery store or we fill up our gas tank. Inflation, Rachel, was 3.8% in the month of April that was hotter than expected and much higher than the, you know, kind of two or three that the Fed would like inflation to be at, and things are really picking up. You know, energy prices were up 6.1%. Vehicle maintenance is up. Food is up.

That's the stuff that we feel as consumers. So what stuck up to you in the data and kind of how do you wrap your head around it? Well, that headline number's up a bit from 3.3% in March. It's the highest annual rate we're seeing since May of 2023. That's spike, though, as you noted, it's being heavily fueled by. We saw an energy index surge of 17.9% over the last 12 months. Energy commodities spike 29.2%. Gas prices up 28.4%.

Fuel oil rising 54.3%. Core inflation, right? So excluding volatile food and energy costs also accelerated to 2.8% annually, hitting a monthly increase of 0.4%. But consumers are seeing price hikes in everyday categories, right? Electricity costs, motor vehicle maintenance, airline fares. obviously the really immediate ramifications are the squeeze on the consumer. I mean, we're seeing inflation outpace annual wage growth for the first time in three years. That actually drove real inflation-adjusted hourly earnings down by 0.3% based on this recent readout.

Now, there's been some speculation that this could maybe alter the Fed's playbook, right? We're seeing fixed income markets are kind of adjusting to this higher for longer rate environment. You've got some analysts floating the possibility of a rate hike. But I think ultimately we're seeing a reality where there's this, you know, prolonged gap between sticky inflation. We're seeing low-yielding traditional bank accounts means that cash reserves might rapidly lose their purchasing power. So there are a lot of first and second order impacts on consumers. And it's something that's not just going to go away, even if the current conflict that we're

seeing that's driving some of these price hikes is to abate in the next two, three weeks. Tyler, one of the interesting things is the market does not really seem to care that the CPI is going up in particular. And one of the pushbacks I always get when I post about this is, hey, as long as the hyperscalers continue to spend a trillion dollars, give plus or minus on building out this AI infrastructure, who cares if bananas are a little bit more expensive or it costs, you know, a little bit more to fill your gas tank. there's a little bit of truth to that, but it also seems like it's a little worrying under the surface. Yeah, and this is not just something that we're seeing in these numbers right now. It's kind of been bubbling under the surface because like we said, the market's rallying. S&P 500, as we'll call a representative sample of the entire market is doing well. I mean, it's up 8% this year. The accident 100's up 16%. But if you can start to look down into the components,

there is really like a have and have nots aspect to this, mostly related to AI infrastructure spending and kind of that all the trickle-down effects when you get into that. Because right now, only 52% of the stocks in the S&P 500 are now above their 50-day moving average, which basically means you have a almost half, 48% of them are basically like trending down and probably headed down further in the sense of like consumer spending. We're seeing margins compression. We're seeing lack of sales. We discussed this a little bit yesterday, Travis,

talking about consumer goods stocks like Nike, where we're seeing having to go to discounting and things like that to drive sales, but it's also just leading to margin pressured for them. And that's also because consumers are feeling it as well on these particular companies. In this strange sense of like, yeah, we feel the set, from like the wallet perspective,

we feel what's going on with inflation. But the market, doesn't seem to care because you have this weird place of like AI infrastructure spending with these gigantic companies that are either spending on the cash on hand or spending it on from cash from operations where they don't have to take on debt what are they're not worried too much about inflation rates or anything like that because it's not like there's going to be long-term consequences to what they're doing yeah it is a really interesting dynamic the other thing is that we have not seen a huge impact on the labor market, at least from an unemployment

perspective. Rachel pointed out that wages are not keeping up with inflation, at least in the last few months. That could end up being an issue, but we haven't seen those layoffs because of AI yet. So maybe things change if that comes to the fore. When we come back, we are going to get to PPI and what those numbers look like. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, Investing. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile. For faster trades, anywhere you go. Try the all-new Fidelity Trader Plus.

Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet at Fidelity.com slash Trader Plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokered Services, LLC, member NYS-I-S-PC. Welcome back to Motley Fool Higem's Investing. PPI or the producer price index also came out this morning as we're recording. And that was even more shocking when I saw those numbers. Tyler, prices were up 1.4% in the month of April. That was from a month ago.

That was not the year over year. That was the month over month number. Year over year was up 6%. Energy was up. Food was up. Services are up. this seems like it's only going to make that CPI number that we talked about in the first segment worse, but we haven't quite even seen this flow through yet.

PPI, you could say, is the leading indicator of CPI because it's higher up the supply chain, you know, your distributors, your manufacturers that are going to add value and then finally get it to the customer eventually. This is where they're seeing the pricing pressure from a lot of things that we were just talking about. You have basically this supply bottleneck talking about AI hyperscaler infrastructure spending. It feels like every discussion we have to these days comes back in some way or another to AI infrastructure spending because it's so large. But you look at a lot of suppliers in these industries.

They're looking at like book to bill ratios where the amount of orders coming in the door is 70% more than the equipment that they're shipping out in any given month. backlogs for stuff multiple years. And so the equipment that they're having to produce and supplies they're producing, having to bring in the door are going way up. So you have this bottleneck of BIPs, basically companies that cannot make things fast enough to get out the door. That's driving up prices. And then on the original raw material side, we have the closure of straight or aboos. You want to call it the war, the conflict, whatever term you want to put to what is happening. It's just basically the closure of the straight of Hormuz has wider implications. We're not just talking about oil and gas here in refined products. This is a part of the world that exports 10 to 20% of

the world's aluminum, 20% of the world's fertilizer, 30% of the world's helium, which sounds kind of weird. I'm not talking about balloons. I'm talking about like semiconductors and medical imaging. These are the sort of things that matter when we're talking about. These are the weird disruptions that we had during the pandemic that we didn't realize we're going to have a huge impact, but it's some, you know, small product that ends up kind of breaking the supply chain. Yeah. And we're getting to the point now where these things are really starting to bleed through because, you know, a couple weeks, everyone, we all, you know, started pulling at our hair and

thought the world was on fire. It was like, but we started to get through, but it's now been like seven or eight weeks. And now we're looking at actual shortages. The U.S. has been drawing down this retreat for petroleum reserve. inventories have been dropping worldwide. We're already starting to see like European curtailment of flights is already in the, I think it was like, they said two million passenger range in this month alone. There's a lot of things where we're starting to see the tightening of the markets to the

point where we're seeing very high rising prices because we're just in short supply of things. And it's hard to see that changing anytime soon. Yeah, Rachel, I want to add commodities into this. Tyler kind of alluded to this, but it's, Some of these numbers, if you look at the year-over-year changes, are absolutely crazy. Crude oil, we know that's up, a little over 60%, gasoline up 71%. But if we go to something like metals, silver is up 170%, lithium, you know, lithium ion batteries, up 200%.

You go to food, wheat is up 27%. That's a smaller number, but that's actually making its way into those food prices that we talked about earlier. Whoa, up 58%. This is not the same as a year ago when we were talking about inflation because there was going to be tariffs. Tariffs, you could go, well, it's a little bit of take money from your left pocket and put it in your right pocket. Maybe there's a little bit of a jobs benefit for the U.S. economy. If those jobs are being pulled back, you can kind of move things around.

It's much harder to move things around when your core raw materials are going up being priced astronomically. And we'll talk about companies in just a second, but this is going across the supply chain to things like, memory and chips and all kinds of stuff. So this seems like something we really need to keep an eye on. Yeah, I mean, the reverberations are basically across every sector you can think of. And that's why PPI is so important. It acts as this very key indicator of inflation. It tracks price fluctuations before they ever reach consumers. So you kind of think of it as the early warning system for consumers, right? Consumer Price Index tracks what you and I pay at the register. But the producer price index, or PPI, it tracks inflation to the factory floor. So what businesses are

paying for raw materials, like you just mentioned, fuel, wholesale supplies, before those products ever reach a store shelf. And we are seeing astronomical spikes in the cost of energy to run factories, food ingredients, for packaging, and just the baseline services required to ship goods. And so, if you're looking at this as an investor or as an everyday consumer, this is a look into the immediate future and what it spells for a lot of these different costs. And the important thing to note is when the costs of making a product explode this quickly, most businesses can't afford to just absorb the financial hit. And so obviously to protect their margins, they are going to eventually pass that down to the consumer. And I do think if you're looking at this today, it is a bit of a

preview of what we're going to be seeing in terms of price hikes on grocery shelves, retail websites at the gas pump. I think it also underscores the fact that as robust as the stock market's performance continues to be, there is and remains a fundamental disconnect between the realized economic reality for a lot of consumers. And that's also important to us as investors for a lot of the companies that we own and follow. You alluded to it where we're going to try to tie all this together in the next segment and talk about what this means for us as investors in the market going forward. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Jems, investing. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity.

customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile. For faster trades, anywhere you go. Try the all-new Fidelity Trader Plus. Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet at Fidelity.com slash trader plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity brokerage services, LLC, member NYS E, SIPC. Welcome back to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, investing. All right, so we've talked about CPI.

We've talked about PPI. Now, what does this actually mean to the bottom line and to our investments? So we know that consumers are getting more stretched. Some costs are going up. I've been hearing a lot more reports about supply chains being stretched. Apple are still undersupplied with iPhones. They're maybe not making as many Macs as they would like or could sell because of chip shortages and memory costs are going up. So maybe margins get squeezed.

You have companies like Target, Walmart, Costco. So they're the consumer touch point. Some of those stocks are extremely highly valued, 40, 50 times earnings. So, Rachel, with all of this backdrop of inflation, of kind of this tenuous position that consumers are in, but yet we're still investing a ton in artificial intelligence, where are you looking at risks and opportunities for investors? Yeah, I mean, I think there are risks and opportunities across a range of markets. One of the things that's kind of interesting to consider is the subscription models for services. like Netflix and Spotify, right? I mean, these are services that tend to be built on recurring monthly cycles.

So historically, there's kind of this level of baseline consistency. But what we'll often see in these, you know, maybe difficult macro periods is maybe instead of a user maintaining three or four active streaming subscriptions, they'll have a cyclical pattern. Maybe they'll subscribe, say, to Netflix for a single season of a show and then they'll, they'll cancel, especially during these periods of economic pressure. So I think that's something that could be a risk to what I think are, you know, fundamentally great businesses like Netflix and Spotify. You talked a bit about the retailers, right?

So Target's an interesting example. They rely really heavily on home decor and apparel sales. So there are, there's, I think, a much broader exposure to non-essential spending. Whereas you have Walmart, right, they have about 60% of their U.S. sales come from grocery sales and household staples. One other example, you think of a premium operator like Costco. You know, they make most of their profits from their membership-based model. given them pretty predictable cash flows as well during past volatile periods. And not saying necessarily go out and buy Walmart and Costco, but I do think it's important

to understand where the resilient businesses are and how those cyclical elements trickle down overall. Yeah, Tyler, how do you think about this cyclicality? Because it does seem like, man, when prices go up like this, the last time this happened was, you know, 2021 going into 2022, the market was not real happy at a certain point, but it took a little while to get to that point where the market went, oh my gosh, this is a problem. At least to a degree, there's, I think, maybe a little bit more expectation this could be coming because also in 2022, the thing that we had in coinciding with it was zero percent interest rates

for a while. And then all of a sudden we're like, oh, man, we really need to change course here. We're already, I think with the federal fund rates is three and a half, three point seven So there's already some built in like inflate or interest rate sort of. But I think the expectation has been that we were going to lower those rates. And maybe now we may be moving to a point where the expectation is we're going to have to raise those rates. That seems to be where the market kind of goes, oh my gosh, we got to raise our discount rate and then valuations start to fall because those rate expectations change.

Yeah. I think that's it's a fairer thing. And when it comes to valuation, perhaps there's, I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of more growth-oriented people that are maybe, you know, throwing valuation to the wayside these days. Perhaps to my chagrin and why some of the stuff I've been buying has not been doing as well. But when I'm thinking about this specifically in like the consumer spending, inflation going up, budgets tightening, I'm actually, the thing that I'm most thinking is like at risk is like the middle market stuff. not the discretionary, the Walmarts, the Costco's of the world, or the top end. It's that stuff sort of in the middle.

And here's why I'm coming at it from this way. I don't think it's any secret. There's been reports all over. 50% of consumer spending these days is from the top 10% of earners in the United States. And so in that regard, a lot of those things where you see discretionary spending on the higher-end might not change that much. I mean, take airlines, for example, we have been talking about higher gas prices and one of the biggest causes of inflation was airline tickets.

And yet, over the past couple of weeks where we saw airlines give guidance for 2026, all of them raised earnings guidance. And they were saying, like, we're booked up. Things are looking really good. It's, you know, maybe when international flights start to get canceled because of, we'll see a change in heart there. For right now, the well off are basically propping up a lot of spending in that regard. And then back to the essentials, you have the Walmarts, the Costco's of the world.

It's hard to see them really suffering as a result. Maybe some of the mix on products is different. But what I'm thinking is things in the middle, fast casual restaurants, athletic wear, cosmetics, automotive, things where people across all income spectrums are paying up to do, but aren't necessarily like the. things that you have to do in any given day. Like we said yesterday's show, we were talking about the athletic wear sort of market. And unsurprisingly, the company that we pointed out as doing the best was on holdings, again, very much on the upper end, targeting that higher spending demographic relative to everyone else in their industry who are not doing quite as well. And so if you're looking at your, you know, at risk of the consumer, I think it's that real

middle market area of the Chipotle's of the world, the Kavas, the Nikes, things like that, where you're going to see the most impact on how people spend their money and likely to see the discounting, the struggle for sales, you know, struggles with inventory, maybe some write-downs and things like that, where at least from a business perspective, I think we're going to see the most effect. And then valuation, you know, I feel like we've been trying to guess what people think about valuations for 15, 20 years and I've been getting it wrong every time anyways. So let's, we'll see. The one thing that I want to add is this is a kind of point in the market where I'm looking very closely at one valuations, but balance sheets. Because

whether this current point is, you know, the peak in 2021, whether it's, you know, we're going into 2008, 2009, whether it's a, you know, dot com is the, or AI is the new dot com bubble. we don't know what that future looks like, but companies that have really good balance sheets have some sort of differentiation, pricing power. They're going to be able to survive whatever comes next, whether that's good or bad. And so these fluctuations in inflation and things like that maybe aren't necessarily the same impacts for those stronger companies. So that's just one thing I want to flag for investors is there's a lot of uncertainty out there. I have more questions than answers, but I think Lou's K-shaped economy is exactly what Tyler is talking about. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the

Motley Cool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy our sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Montley Cool's editorial standards, and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Tyler Crow, Rachel Warren and Dan Boye Behind the Glass, I'm Travis Hoyum. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you here tomorrow.