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.

I am your host, David Bonson.

I am the managing partner at the Bonson Group.

And this week, I am absolutely totally

exhausted talking about tariffs. We have done a significant amount of work this week in the

subject of tariffs because that was the topic du jour. And it all came to a head over last weekend going into Monday Day in the markets.

And I decided to devote today's Dividing Cafe to the subject at large

because I feel that it's important that especially clients of ours,

I care about everybody, but I care about our clients the most. And I feel that there is

a understandable complexity and ambiguity around the issue right now that is making it very hard

for investors to really narrow down what it is we're talking about, what is going on, what could be

going on, what the risks are going forward, and so forth. And I want to do something today that I

don't get a chance to do very often, which is deconstruct what has become a largely political

issue, but deconstructed

sans politics, really allow the noise of the political and the controversial to come out

and just have a more specific talk about the economic impact and reality and the risk-reward paradigm that exist for those of us who are,

of course, investors. We'll start with what exactly happened this week and then move forward from

there. And I hope the sequence in which I do this provides a little logic and simplicity to the topic at large.

Easier for me to talk about tariffs outside of a particular moment in political reality,

to talk about tariffs philosophically, to talk about what tariffs do, what they don't do, where they could be good, where they could be bad, and so forth.

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