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. It is now Tuesday, February 20th. Brian Saitel with you here popping in to do the recording

and some of the fill-in work on on today's long version of D.C. today per the holiday,

President's Day yesterday. Much of this was written actually by David. So, but kind of a quiet day

in markets, you know, we at, we're probably up around 30 points.

At the lows, we were down 150.

And we made a push towards the end to try to get back to fair value, but never really got there.

We closed down 64 points on the Dow and a basis point lower on tens at 427.

So rates and markets held in their fine.

It was interesting that market really didn't pull back all that much today, although

the volatility index actually went up more than I would have assumed.

It was up something like 9% on the day.

Just a heavy correlation recently with the U.S. dollar and stock prices.

And we've seen this in history.

But sometimes they'll decouple. Well,

you'll get a weakening dollar and a following market or a strengthening dollar and a rising

market. Now it's the opposite. Strengthening dollar means falling market and weakening dollar

means stronger market. Part of that is because, you know, weaker currency globally after such

a run-up in the dollar versus everywhere else is

technically a good thing within reason for exports. There was a New York judge that issued a

judgment against former President Donald Trump for $354 million for overstating his net worth on

loans, which is a fraud claim.

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