Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe, a little different that we're putting it out on Thursday night, but it's actually quite rare in our business

that we have a Friday holiday. And yet that is what this week is on our good Friday as we go

into the Easter weekend. And so hopefully you'll have time over this weekend to take this in.

I kind of have a lot to go through. And so I'm just going to

get into it. It was a lot of work that went into this week's Diviny Cafe because I think it's a

very important topic. And it kind of covers a number of different subjects that I believe are all

correlated and connected. And they can seem to be separated, but they have a certain overlap that I think is

important in the way we think about this subject from an investing standpoint, as well as geopolitically.

And the issue is at a high level, the energy story, and particularly oil, oil markets, oil dependency, oil prices, where some of the

politics and geopolitics of oil play in.

But the subject became a sort of weekend escapade last Sunday. And it's funny, it was just two weeks ago. I'm

writing a Dividing Cafe about big Sunday disruptions in financial markets as we had bank

failures and FDIC bailouts and credits with takeovers by UBS and all those things.

And last Sunday I think was pretty big news, but wasn't so much related to financial markets

and certainly banking distress.

But the announcement from OPEC Plus that they were cutting a,

let's just round up and use, well, round down actually,

use a million barrels per day from their production quotas.

And that would kick in on May 1 and that they announced that as a target for the remainder of the year.

So, you know, you're quite literally talking about a couple hundred million barrels

coming out of intended supply in global production.

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