Brian Stewart, our director of news at Seeking Alpha. Welcome back to the show. Great to have you.

Thanks. Great to be back. Yeah, we took a couple weeks off. So anything to say in that space of time to catch listeners up before we look

towards this week or feel free to just start with this week and what you're most focused on.

Did anything happen in the last two weeks? I'm not even sure that anything noteworthy or

spinning our wheels. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the same themes have

dominated the market the last couple weeks. It's tariffs. It's just sort of the administration's

impact on the economy and on economic movers. I think the item that plays into that most this week is

Trump's commentary about Fed Chairman Powell. Trump was putting a lot of pressure on Powell to

cut rates, suggesting that he would replace him with somebody who will cut rates if Powell

doesn't do it. Powell sort of of stood his grounds i think one of the

things about how a lot of investors have uh quibbles concerns complaints about how paul handled the

post covid inflation situation a lot of people think he held on too long and let the inflation

get out of control in that frame. But I think the thing that that taught us was that Powell

was willing to stand up to sort of market pressure, market expectations. And so so far,

he hasn't folded to Trump. And Trump has sort of backed off some of that.

So independence of the Fed is very important.

So I think that that was kind of a win for the market and the market viewed it as such.

And so now I think attention turns to more of the sort of nitty-gritty, normal, more routine,

kind of what's going to happen next for the Fed.

Our last episode from a couple weeks ago,

the headline was, is Trump playing chicken with the world? And it seems to me in the subsequent week since that episode,

it seems that more or less this is the art of the negotiation that Trump is infamous, famous

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