Five Consumer Staples Stocks to Buy Amid High Inflation, Risk of Recession
Five consumer staples stocks to buy amid high inflation, risk of recession and Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine offer ways to protect from financial…
Five consumer staples stocks to buy amid high inflation, risk of recession and Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine offer ways to protect from financial fallout.
The five consumer staples stocks to buy provide products and services people need to use frequently as essential items. Food, clothing and shelter are basic human needs and companies that provide them have customers who may scale back on such purchases but not eliminate them.
In contrast, the consumer discretionary sector manufactures and markets luxury goods that consumers may want but could put off buying when economic uncertainties warrant caution. Consumer staples, of which food and beverage are a subset, usually outperform stock indexes during recessions and bear markets.
Pension Fund Chairman Offers Analysis of Consumer Staples Stocks
Consumer staples companies tend to have reliable cash flows and can increase prices as costs rise. Consumers will reduce spending in other areas when money becomes tight, said Bob Carlson, a pension fund chairman who also leads the Retirement Watch investment newsletter.
For a broader portfolio that focuses on consumer staples generally, there are several good exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that deliver both solid returns and attractive yields. The most volatile of the group, and the one with the highest recent returns, is iShares U.S. Consumer Staples (IYK). Bargain hunters may like the fund’s recent pullback to offer a reduced buy price.
The fund holds 52 stocks and 65% of the fund is in the 10 largest holdings. Top positions include Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO), PepsiCo. (NASDAQ: PEP). The fund also offers a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) yield of 1.42%.
Bob Carlson, head of the Retirement Watch newsletter, meets with Paul Dykewicz.
Walmart Ranks as One of the Five Consumer Staples Stocks to Buy
Jim Woods recommends consumer staples stocks in his Intelligence Reportnewsletter. One of them is Walmart (NYSE: WMT), of Bentonville, Arkansas, the largest U.S. retailer. The stock is a core holding in the Income Multipliers portfolio of his Intelligence Reportnewsletter.
Walmart reported excess inventory earlier in the year that led to lower-than-expected earnings, but the country’s largest and one of its most important retailers is rebounding, Woods wrote to his subscribers in his latest newsletter. The company reported that it has made significant progress on reducing discretionary inventory and focusing more on “necessity” spending, such as food, toiletries, etc., Woods continued.
“Doing so helped ameliorate otherwise worse results,” Woods wrote. “So, while in the aggregate the latest retail earnings were better than feared, we still can’t rule out that the longer inflation stays in place, and as jobless claims slowly rise, consumer spending won’t be further pressured.”
Procter & Gamble Picked as One of the Five Consumer Staples Stocks to Buy
Another Intelligence Report Income Multipliers portfolio position is Procter & Gamble, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based diversified consumer product company. Procter & Gamble offers a strong cash flow that allows it to provide a dividend yield of 2.4%.
In addition, Procter & Gamble has a rising dividend policy. In fact, the company has raised its dividend annually for the past 66 years.
Potential risks to the company include inflation weighing on its profit margins, weakened sales from emerging markets in China and the effects of a strong U.S. dollar, said Michelle Connell, who heads Dallas-based Portia Capital Management.
Another risk is that consumers may use private label and generic products more than those of Procter & Gamble, Connell continued. Even though the stock is down so far this year, it has a potential upside of 19% within the next 12 months, she added.
Hershey Sweetens Five Consumer Staples Stocks to Buy
The Hershey Company (NYSE: HSY), of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is a Buy recommendation from BofA Global Research, due partly to its resilience in times of economic distress when people crave sweets as comfort food.
“I’m sweet on the company literally known for its ‘Kisses,’ and that is The Hershey Company,” said Jim Woods, who heads the Intelligence Reportnewsletter and directs High Velocity Optionsand Bullseye Stock Trader. He has recommended Hershey in the past in High Velocity Options and may do so again in his fast-paced trading service when the timing is right.
Woods explained that as the leading U.S. confectionery manufacturer, Hershey controls around 46% of the domestic chocolate space with brands such as Hershey bars, Reese’s and KitKat.
“Last quarter, HSY saw strong earnings per share (EPS) growth of 22% year over year, and I expect the company to deliver an even tastier result when they report earnings again in late October,” Woods said. “The reason being is that confection sales are up of late, and I think it’s because many consumers are taking refuge in the small pleasures in life where they can, especially considering the dual pinch of rising inflation and soaring gas prices.”
PepsiCo Is Another of the Five Consumer Staples Stocks to Buy
PepsiCo, aPurchase, New York-based global snack and beverage company, is the third of five consumer staples stocks to buy. Its key divisions include Frito-Lay North America (FLNA), Quaker Foods NA, North America Beverages (NAB), Latin America, Europe Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA) and Asia, Middle East and North Africa (AMENA).
The company also operates in the United Kingdom, Mexico, India and China. Brands include Pepsi Cola, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Tropicana, Frito-Lay, Quaker and others. BofA has a Buy rating and a $190 price target on the stock. BofA Global Research wrote a research note that its valuation reflectsPepsiCo’s “balanced momentum, margin support and brand investments” are capable of delivering the high end of its long-term outlook.
Ramon Laguarta, upon taking over as PepsiCo’s chief executive officer in 2018, pivoted the company toward a growth-oriented path, BofA wrote. Reinvestment in the business and an appetite for risk remain at the core of the company’s cornerstone philosophies of this strategy, shown in PEP’s ramping digitization efforts, new category expansion and supply chain investments to fuel a stronger innovation engine, BofA added.
Coca-Cola Climbs into Five Consumer Staples Stocks to Buy
BofA Global Research placed a Buy rating on Coca-Cola with a $70 price objective, reflecting a target price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of 26x the investment firm’s fiscal year 2023 earnings per share (EPS) estimate. This valuation is a premium to non-alcoholic beverage peers (22.9x), justified by BofA’s view that Coca-Cola should weather current macro headwinds better than its peers, given its size and pricing model.
Atlanta-based Coca-Cola also is recommended by Mark Skousen, PhD, who added it as a favorite choice in his Forecasts & Strategies investment newsletter. Skousen placed Coca-Cola in his newsletter’s dividend-oriented Flying Five portfolio and has watched it turn a profit this year even though the market overall has dropped.
Coca-Cola Climbs into Skousen’s Flying Five Portfolio
Each August issue, Skousen searches for the five highest-yielding, lowest-priced stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Coca-Cola is one of four stocks that recently retained a place in that portfolio, featuring good dividend-paying, reasonably priced stocks whose shares look ripe to rise.
Mark Skousen, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, meets with Paul Dykewicz.
Skousen also teams up with Jim Woods for their Fast Money Alert trading service that recently recommended an energy beverage stock. Both seasoned investment prognosticators scan the beverage industry for stocks that appear positioned to outperform the market in the current conditions of high inflation, supply chain challenges and Fed rate hikes aimed at slowing economic growth.
Connell is another advocate of Coca-Cola, a company that has boosted its dividend payout for the past 60 years. It currently offers a dividend yield of 2.7%.
Warren Buffett, one of the world’s best investors, must like the stock and dividend, since it ranks as his third-biggest holding, trailing only Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), Connell said. The stock is up by double-digit percentages this year and has the financial fundamentals to rise higher, she added.
COVID-19 cases and deaths can affect supply and demand for products such consumer staples such as food and beverages, especially with the global sourcing of ingredients. It can pay off for investors to track trends in COVID-19 closely.
U.S. COVID-19 deaths rose for the sixth consecutive week by more than 3,000, jumping to 1,048,186, as of Sept. 6, according to Johns Hopkins University. Cases in the United States climbed to 94,880,701. America still faces a sad situation as the nation with the largest number of COVID-19 deaths and cases.
Worldwide COVID-19 deaths in the last week only rose 14,977, compared to more than 33,000 the previous week, to total 6,505,731, as of Sept. 6, according to Johns Hopkins. Global COVID-19 cases climbed nearly 4 million in the past week to reach 606,246,956 on the same date.
Roughly 79.2% of the U.S. population, or 262,908,216, have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, as of Aug. 31, the CDC reported. Fully vaccinated people total 224,113,439, or 67.5%, of the U.S. population, according to the CDC. The United States also has given at least one COVID-19 booster vaccine to 108.8 million people, up 300,000 for the second consecutive week.
The five consumer staples stocks to buy feature investments that offer products and services that should sustain resilient demand despite inflation of 8.5%, based on the latest report from the Consumer Price Index. With further risk of a recession after two straight 0.75% rate hikes by the Fed in June and July, as well as possibly another in September as Russia continues attacking Ukraine, the five consumer staples stocks offer a potential refuge for risk-averse investors.
Paul Dykewicz, www.pauldykewicz.com, is an accomplished, award-winning journalist who has written for Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, USA Today, the Journal of Commerce, Seeking Alpha, Guru Focus and other publications and websites. Paul, who can be followed on Twitter @PaulDykewicz, is the editor of StockInvestor.com and DividendInvestor.com, a writer for both websites and a columnist. He further is editorial director of Eagle Financial Publications in Washington, D.C., where he edits monthly investment newsletters, time-sensitive trading alerts, free e-letters and other investment reports. Paul previously served as business editor of Baltimore’s Daily Record newspaper. Paul also is the author of an inspirational book, “Holy Smokes! Golden Guidance from Notre Dame’s Championship Chaplain,” with a foreword by former national championship-winning football coach Lou Holtz. The book is great as a gift and is endorsed by Joe Montana, Joe Theismann, Ara Parseghian, “Rocket” Ismail, Reggie Brooks, Dick Vitale and many others. Call 202-677-4457 for multiple-book pricing.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made at least 25 statistical or numerical errors during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the overwhelming majority exaggerated the severity of the pandemic, according to a new study.
Researchers who have been tracking CDC errors compiled 25 instances where the agency offered demonstrably false information. For each instance, they analyzed whether the error exaggerated or downplayed the severity of COVID-19.
Of the 25 instances, 20 exaggerated the severity, the researchers reported in the study, which was published ahead of peer review on March 23.
“The CDC has expressed significant concern about COVID-19 misinformation. In order for the CDC to be a credible source of information, they must improve the accuracy of the data they provide,” the authors wrote.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
Most Errors Involved Children
Most of the errors were about COVID-19’s impact on children.
In mid-2021, for instance, the CDC claimed that 4 percent of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were kids. The actual percentage was 0.04 percent. The CDC eventually corrected the misinformation, months after being alerted to the issue.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky falsely told a White House press briefing in October 2021 that there had been 745 COVID-19 deaths in children, but the actual number, based on CDC death certificate analysis, was 558.
Walensky and other CDC officials also falsely said in 2022 that COVID-19 was a top five cause of death for children, citing a study that gathered CDC data instead of looking at the data directly. The officials have not corrected the false claims.
Other errors include the CDC claiming in 2022 that pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations were “increasing again” when they’d actually peaked two weeks earlier; CDC officials in 2023 including deaths among infants younger than 6 months old when reporting COVID-19 deaths among children; and Walensky on Feb. 9, 2023, exaggerating the pediatric death toll before Congress.
“These errors suggest the CDC consistently exaggerates the impact of COVID-19 on children,” the authors of the study said.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 24, 2023 – Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have been awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative.
Credit: Wake Forest University School of Medicine
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 24, 2023 – Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have been awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative.
The NIH HEAL initiative, which launched in 2018, was created to find scientific solutions to stem the national opioid and pain public health crises. The funding is part of the HEAL Data 2 Action (HD2A) program, designed to use real-time data to guide actions and change processes toward reducing overdoses and improving opioid use disorder treatment and pain management.
With the support of the grant, researchers will create a data infrastructure support center to assist HD2A innovation projects at other institutions across the country. These innovation projects are designed to address gaps in four areas—prevention, harm reduction, treatment of opioid use disorder and recovery support.
“Our center’s goal is to remove barriers so that solutions can be more streamlined and rapidly distributed,” said Meredith C.B. Adams, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology, biomedical informatics, physiology and pharmacology, and public health sciences at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
By monitoring opioid overdoses in real time, researchers will be able to identify trends and gaps in resources in local communities where services are most needed.
“We will collect and analyze data that will inform prevention and treatment services,” Adams said. “We’re shifting chronic pain and opioid care in communities to quickly offer solutions.”
The center will also develop data related resources, education and training related to substance use, pain management and the reduction of opioid overdoses.
According to the CDC, there was a 29% increase in drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2020, and nearly 75% of those deaths involved an opioid.
“Given the scope of the opioid crises, which was only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s imperative that we improve and create new prevention strategies,” Adams said. “The funding will create the infrastructure for rapid intervention.”
An enduring mystery for three years is how Donald Trump came to be the president who shut down American society for what turned out to be a manageable respiratory virus, setting off an unspeakable crisis with waves of destructive fallout that continue to this day.
Let’s review the timeline and offer some well-founded speculations about what happened.
On March 9, 2020, Trump was still of the opinion that the virus could be handled by normal means.
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
What changed? Deborah Birx reports in her book that Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion. Jared Kushner reports that he simply listened to reason. Mike Pence says he was persuaded that his staff would respect him more. No question (and based on all existing reports) that he found himself surrounded by “trusted advisors” amounting to about 5 or so people (including Mike Pence and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb)
It was only a week later when Trump issued the edict to close all “indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate,” initiating the biggest regime change in US history that flew in the face of all rights and liberties Americans had previously taken for granted. It was the ultimate in political triangulation: as John F. Kennedy cut taxes, Nixon opened China, and Clinton reformed welfare, Trump shut down the economy he promised to revive. This action confounded critics on all sides.
A month later, Trump said his decision to have “turned off” the economy saved millions of lives, later even claiming to have saved billions. He has yet to admit error.
....My Administration and I built the greatest economy in history, of any country, turned it off, saved millions of lives, and now am building an even greater economy than it was before. Jobs are flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the rest to follow. Sit back & watch!
Even as late as June 23rd of that year, Trump was demanding credit for having followed all of Fauci’s recommendations. Why do they love him and hate me, he wanted to know.
We did a great job on CoronaVirus, including the very early ban on China, Ventilator production, and Testing, which is by far the most, and best, in the World. We saved millions of U.S. lives.! Yet the Fake News refuses to acknowledge this in a positive way. But they do give....
Something about this story has never really added up. How could one person have been so persuaded by a handful of others such as Fauci, Birx, Pence, and Kushner and his friends? He surely had other sources of information – some other scenario or intelligence – that fed into his disastrous decision.
In one version of events, his advisors simply pointed to the supposed success of Xi Jinping in enacting lockdowns in Wuhan, which the World Health Organization claimed had stopped infections and brought the virus under control. Perhaps his advisors flattered Trump with the observation that he is at least as great as the president of China so he should be bold and enact the same policies here.
One problem with this scenario is timing. The Oval Office meetings that preceded his March 16, 2020, edict took place the weekend of the 14th and 15th, Friday and Saturday. It was already clear by the 11th that Trump was ready for lockdowns. This was the same day as Fauci’s deliberately misleading testimony to the House Oversight Committee in which he rattled the room with predictions of Hollywood-style carnage.
On the 12th, Trump shut all travel from Europe, the UK, and Australia, causing huge human pile-ups at international airports. On the 13th, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document that transferred control of pandemic policy from the CDC to the National Security Council and eventually the Department of Homeland Security. By the time that Trump met with Fauci and Birx in that legendary weekend, the country was already under quasi-martial law.
Isolating the date in the trajectory here, it is apparent that whatever happened to change Trump occurred on March 10, 2020, the day after his Tweet saying there should be no shutdowns and one day before Fauci’s testimony.
That something very likely revolves around the most substantial discovery we’ve made in three years of investigations. It was Debbie Lerman who first cracked the code: Covid policy was forged not by the public-health bureaucracies but by the national-security sector of the administrative state. She has further explained that this occurred because of two critical features of the response: 1) the belief that this virus came from a lab leak, and 2) the vaccine was the biosecurity countermeasure pushed by the same people as the fix.
Knowing this, we gain greater insight into 1) why Trump changed his mind, 2) why he has never explained this momentous decision and otherwise completely avoids the topic, and 3) why it has been so unbearably difficult to find out any information about these mysterious few days other than the pablum served up in books designed to earn royalties for authors like Birx, Pence, and Kushner.
Based on a number of second-hand reports, all available clues we have assembled, and the context of the times, the following scenario seems most likely. On March 10, and in response to Trump’s dismissive tweet the day before, some trusted sources within and around the National Security Council (Matthew Pottinger and Michael Callahan, for example), and probably involving some from military command and others, came to Trump to let him know a highly classified secret.
Imagine a scene from Get Smart with the Cone of Silence, for example. These are the events in the life of statecraft that infuse powerful people with a sense of their personal awesomeness. The fate of all of society rests on their shoulders and the decisions they make at this point. Of course they are sworn to intense secrecy following the great reveal.
The revelation was that the virus was not a textbook virus but something far more threatening and terrible. It came from a research lab in Wuhan. It might in fact be a bioweapon. This is why Xi had to do extreme things to protect his people. The US should do the same, they said, and there is a fix available too and it is being carefully guarded by the military.
It seems that the virus had already been mapped in order to make a vaccine to protect the population. Thanks to 20 years of research on mRNA platforms, they told him, this vaccine can be rolled out in months, not years. That means that Trump can lock down and distribute vaccines to save everyone from the China virus, all in time for the election. Doing this would not only assure his reelection but guarantee that he would go down in history as one of the greatest US presidents of all time.
This meeting might only have lasted an hour or two – and might have included a parade of people with the highest-level security clearances – but it was enough to convince Trump. After all, he had battled China for two previous years, imposing tariffs and making all sorts of threats. It was easy to believe at that point that China might have initiated biological warfare as retaliation. That’s why he made the decision to use all the power of the presidency to push a lockdown under emergency rule.
To be sure, the Constitution does not allow him to override the discretion of the states but with the weight of the office complete with enough funding and persuasion, he could make it happen. And thus did he make the fateful decision that not only wrecked his presidency but the country too, imposing harms that will last a generation.
It only took a few weeks for Trump to become suspicious about what happened. For weeks and months, he toggled between believing that he was tricked and believing that he did the right thing. He had already approved another 30 days of lockdowns and even inveighed against Georgia and later Florida for opening. He went so far as to claim that no state could open without his approval.
For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect....
There is another fascinating feature to this entirely plausible scenario. Even as Trump’s advisors were telling him that this could be a bioweapon leaked from the lab in China, we had Anthony Fauci and his cronies going to great lengths to deny it was a lab leak (even if they believed that it was). This created an interesting situation. The NIH and those surrounding Fauci were publicly insisting that the virus was of zoonotic origin, even as Trump’s circle was telling the president that it should be regarded as a bioweapon.
Fauci belonged to both camps, which suggests that Trump very likely knew of Fauci’s deception all along: the “noble lie” to protect the public from knowing the truth. Trump had to be fine with that.
Gradually following the lockdown edicts and the takeover by the Department of Homeland Security, in cooperation with a very hostile CDC, Trump lost power and influence over his own government, which is why his later Tweets urging a reopening fell on deaf ears. To top it off, the vaccine failed to arrive in time for the election. This is because Fauci himself delayed the rollout until after the election, claiming that the trials were not racially diverse enough. Thus Trump’s gambit completely failed, despite all the promises of those around him that it was a guaranteed way to win reelection.
To be sure, this scenario cannot be proven because the entire event – certainly the most dramatic political move in at least a generation and one with unspeakable costs for the country – remains cloaked in secrecy. Not even Senator Rand Paul can get the information he needs because it remains classified. If anyone thinks the Biden approval of releasing documents will show what we need, that person is naive. Still, the above scenario fits all available facts and it is confirmed by second-hand reports from inside the White House.
It’s enough for a great movie or a play of Shakespearean levels of tragedy. And to this day, none of the main players are speaking openly about it.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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