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 and welcome to D.C. today this Thursday, March the 7th. And great to be back with you here again today from Newport Beach, California.

And a nice update in markets today.

We had an update slightly yesterday, but a little more conviction today.

We closed up about 130 points on the Dow.

The S&P was up 1%, a little over 1%, and notched a new all-time high, closed at 51-57.

So again, from remembering back when it was in the 600s, it's surreal to see where it is.

Ten-year was down, just a basis point on the day. We closed at 409 on tens. And global yields, by the way, and basically

the tops call it 30 countries, are all trending lower. Japan is a little bit of an outlier,

but more or less, rates are moving lower as inflation is abating basically globally because of

supply chain easing and all of that. But on the day, Powell finished his

second day of testimony to Congress and more of the same there, not necessarily market moving.

Christine Lagarde in Europe, who runs the ECB, the European Central Bank, kept rates the same at 4%.

Although she did tilt her, had a little bit more towards inflation, moving back towards the

number that they need to see in order to cut rates. And my comment was more around, you know,

they've said June is the date that they think they're going to do that.

And, you know, UK and ECB, they do tend to follow the U.S.

There's a lot of reasons for that.

But the growth paradigm in Europe is just much different than the U.S.

We're looking at 2 to 2.5% GDP growth for 2024 here and something like a tenth of that in the biggest

economy in Europe, which is Germany, at about a quarter of a percent. So whether they can wait till

June before they need to cut rates or not, as we'll see, I'm less convinced that they'll be able to,

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