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

Hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe. I'm your host David Bonson. I'm the chief investment officer at the Bonson Group, and I am also right now a volunteer economics

teacher at Pacific Christian High School where a couple days a week I have the privilege of

teaching about 25 seniors an honors economics course. And yes, I'm going to connect to this to Dividend Cafe today, because I think that there is something intensely investable about the lessons of economics.

And I think that the way I write about investment markets, week in and week

out here in the Dividendon Cafe, presupposes a certain economic framework, a belief system

that is profoundly important in fortifying investable opportunities, in creating the very environment in which

investors are able to find great success. I think we take it for granted for understandable reasons.

It's one of the best things about markets is that they are so easy to take for granted.

They do gazillions of things in gazillions of nanoseconds, and nothing lends itself to taking stuff for granted more than a high volume of activity in a quick period of time.

That's really what markets do, so much so that hundreds of years ago an expression

of invisible hand was created to capture this phenomenon. But the reality is that we are living in a time

in which I think those things that gave the United States in particular an investment superiority, a relative

advantage to the rest of the world in terms of investable activity and investable opportunity,

I think we need to be doubling down on defending those competitive advantages, on recognizing and having gratitude for

the things that gave us a leg up, and then making sure that we defend and protect such.

In reality, my conviction is, I wrote about this in last week's Dividend and Cafe, I think

there are marginal signs that we want to move

the other direction, that we have been so successful in certain elements of economic experimentation

that we've decided we might want to try going about it without the very things that are at the

foundation of some of our success. And I want to call that into question today and have a little

chat about what that means for investors. So essentially this broad narrative about the United States, often being the best house in a bad neighborhood,

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