Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to a very unique dividend cafe based on me being out of the country, actually being back by the time you're watching this,

but I kind of want to do something different this week. And I've taken a bunch of questions and

topics that have come in and I'm just going to go through all these one by one. And so at the

written dividend cafe, you'll see all of these things

sort of drawn out and we're going to have the questions from people, you know, listed out. But

let me just walk through it right now. And some of these topics may grab your interest,

maybe all of them do. And if you have no interest at all in any of the things that I cover,

then I guess this really was a disappointment. But I think you might find something here

to grab your attention. The first issue I want to address is the expectations for the Fed

funds rate based on the consumer price index results of last week

and the producer price index.

And all of a sudden, they're being more discussion of, okay, well, maybe the Fed is going to be

kind of stuck going a little more aggressive.

And you get these two loudmouth governors, board in particular out of St. Louis, who is not a voting member of FMC, but chimes in,

oh, we think maybe now a half a point makes more sense.

But I just want to point out that the futures market is implying a 79% chance of another quarter point rate hike in March

and a 73% chance of another quarter point rate hike in May.

And so May is pretty far out and who knows where data is and the kind of posture and expectation of the central bank by then.

But right now, most things still look, and this is all, you know, well-past data and even how

the bond market kind of tightened in response to the PPI and CPI results last week,

...