Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to another weekly edition of the Dividend Cafe.

I am your host, David Bonson, managing partner of the Bonson Group, and I am excited to be presenting

this week's Dividing Cafe from San Francisco, where I am on Friday and Saturday at an annual

conference at which I speak, and then I will be spending all of next week in our Newport Beach

office before returning to New York City, where it is about 26 degrees.

This week's Dividy Cafe, I started off writing, believing I was just going to go all over the

map and cover some things about valuations and small cap and oil and markets and France and

everything. And some of that's still there, but it really did end up being a little bit more election-centric,

again, as the transition of this presidential administration continues,

and we ended up getting some newsworthy things that kind of inspired me.

And so I'm going to get into tariffs a little bit, get into trade a little bit,

tease up some tax reform stuff a little bit, and then start off with some of these new

appointments that are economic oriented as we get really close to the kind of conclusion of this transition,

the announcements, the appointments. There's still plenty that are going to have a little bit

of a confirmation fight. I'm kind of staying out of the fray. The news cycle right now is mostly

around Pete Heggseth and the defense Secretary position, but just staying more in the

economic lane, there's a lot less controversy expected and a lot less opposition, a pretty

cleaner path to confirmation for most of the folks that President Trump has put into some of

these economic positions.

So just let me go through a quick little list of what came out this week,

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