Welcome to the DC Today, your daily market synopsis of the Dividing Cafe, brought to you every Monday through Thursday to bring you up-to-date information and perspective on financial markets. Hello, good evening. Welcome back to D.C. today. Brian Saitel here with you. It is February 23rd here on this kind of holiday shortened week. And we had an ultimately an up day in the market. We closed up about 111 points. But that was after about a 500 point range. We started out up, right up first half

hour of trading. We're probably up about 220, 220, 225 points in the morning. And then we had

something like a negative 250 print by about 2 o'clock or so Eastern before recovering into the close.

And I'll kind of go through some of the data that we had today as to as to why we saw

that training range. But the bond market was slightly higher today. Rates were a little bit

lower, but not a lot. We're talking a couple of basis points. The one thing I'll note

in the bond market is that while we've had the Fed Minutes released this week and kind of a lot of

noise around interest rates and where Fed is going to take, you know, Fed funds rate and all of this

stuff, if you look at the yield curve, so short term rates versus long term rates, we're technically more inverted now than we were at the start of the week,

which to me really just speaks to, you know, shorter term inflation expectations are a little

higher. So interest rates go up on the short end of the curve. And longer term, you know,

we're still pretty anchored towards basically a

pretty indebted world. And so rates, rates on the lower end, sorry, in the longer end are

down on the week a little bit. But for all that it was talked about, you know, for this Fed,

minutes being released and interest rates moving, frankly, they didn't really move all that much this week.

Market had pretty well already priced in a terminal Fed funds rate of something like five and a quarter.

I take that as good. I like that the market has kind of gotten it right in my opinion as far as where rates are going to go.

Some couple of economic points on the day.

We had initial jobless claims for the week come in a little lighter than expected.

We were looking at something like 197.

We got 192.

And we also had continuing claims.

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