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

Well, hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe. You may be able to tell that I'm not sitting in my studio in New York. I am in the office in New York, and yet our studio,

which is, you know, right here in the office is having some tech difficulties. And so we decided

just to go old school and have me come sit right here at my desk and record Dividendon Cafe for you

as if we didn't have our big fancy studios that we use so much.

I don't think you care much and those you listen to the podcast really don't care.

I want to talk to you today about a pretty sober subject, something much more important than

our studios and where we record and things like that.

And that is the subject of the U.S.'s debt issue.

And there's a kind of fascinating angle on this where I make an argument,

as I've been making for some time,

that the U.S. faces a real systemic problem of low, slow, and no growth.

And I call this problem Japanification.

And the basic kind of setup goes something like this, that an asset bubble forms.

And that could be from a combination of circumstances. You can have

government policy feeding a bubble, excessive, overly accommodative easy money, government

stimulus. You can have just general investor euphoria, human nature doing what it does.

There's a lot of things that create a bubble.

And yet a bubble that forms eventually, of course, pops and bursts.

And then great economic damage is done.

And if the bubble that burst led to enough economic damage by which profits decline in the economy,

wages decline, jobs decline.

...