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 the Monday edition of Dividing Cafe where this is definitely one of those Mondays that reminds me why I do the Monday Dividing Cafe in the way that we do with the format we do.

It also reminds me, by the way, of how much I love doing the Monday Dividendon Cafe.

It is, I find, productive, healthy exercise to go around the horn with these various categories

and address the market relevance from things happening in public policy, the economic data,

the housing market with the federal reserve and energy and so forth.

So every Monday, just trying to give you the main bullets across these different categories

is our goal.

And then every now and then you have a Monday like today where in the few days preceding

it, we just got an avalanche of different things going on that like if it were one of them,

it would have been a pretty substantive Monday dividend cafe.

And we had, I'm going to say five things in the last few days that I want to attention today.

So we'll go through all of our normal categories, but in each one of them,

there is something,

I would say, a little out of the ordinary.

Now, some of these things were taking place on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of last week.

And so over the weekend, I got a pretty good head start on analyzing some of these things,

on writing about them and had prepared what the Dividing Cafe was going to be around some of these things, on writing about them, and had prepared what the Dividing

Cafe was going to be around some of the news, just from various tweets coming from President

Trump to policy announcements, some of which were literally coming during the football playoff

game on Friday night, for example. And then last night, Sunday night,

we got word that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into Fed Chairman

...