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 a special 4th of July weekend Dividing Cafe podcast. This is David

Bonson, the chief investment officer, managing partner here at

the Bonson Group. And those of you watch you on video, you can tell that I am actually sitting in a

different spot than normal. I'm at a hotel in Sag Harbor, New York, where I'm away with my family

for the weekend. We get all settled in our new home in East Hampton here in a few

days and I'm more or less working out of my Manhattan office starting next week for the next

five weeks or so. And it's interesting being in New York, being back in the city for most of

this week, I definitely got a chance

to see something that I think parallels or has some sort of metaphorical connectivity to what

is happening in the economy at large and what we saw in the jobs report today. And that is a city

that is opening, but not fully reopened. In other words,

it is progressing. You see different things moving, but nowhere near, have we arrived nowhere

near to the final destination. And so the Thursday jobs report that showed 4.8 million jobs are covered.

When analysts were expecting 3.2 million, it outperformed by 50%.

Okay, that's a massive miss for economists, analysts, to once again underestimate the

robustness of the jobs recovery recovery but I don't say that

critically because I do think it's very difficult to get a feel for what to expect out there

the trajectory of improvement is very impressive but there there is still a substantial amount many millions of unemployed people, and there's a lot of

room to go. We have an 11.1% unemployment rate. So it's half of where it was at that low point

of when they had shut down the entire country. But it's still two and a half times higher than it was pre-COVID.

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