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.

Well, hello, and welcome to the D.C. today. Today is Tuesday, February 21st, and it's the first day here on Tuesday

after a nice President's Day weekend. I hope everyone had a nice weekend with family and friends.

We had actually the one of the worst, or actually the worst down day in markets so far for

2023. So there's a good amount for me to kind of walk through and unpack here as we get

into today's market action. But on the day, the Dow ended up closing down 697 points, which

was a little over 2%. The S&P was down exactly 2% and the NASDAQ was down

a pretty stunning, 2.5%. So pretty broad-based sell-off in stocks. The 10-year treasury was up 13.5%,

I'm sorry, 13 and a half basis points on the day.

And that was kind of the part of the largest narrative of the day of why it was down.

Futures last night were negative, but not as much as the market sort of let on as the day went on.

The futures were pointing to something like a negative 300 open.

And then after about two, three hours in markets, we were down obviously significantly more. We closed off the lows for the day a little bit. But I think if I sell the

low, it was down something like 710 points, roughly. So just barely off of the lows. So the last

time we were down this much was in December. So for the calendar year of

23, it's, it's kind of our, our, our, our winner for the worst day at markets. I guess that's

why I wore the red tie. Kidding. But so let's talk about what caused this, because it's important.

So interest rates today across the spectrum and kind of last night going into today, we're moving higher.

And basically we're looking at rate paradigm that is looking to be a little bit higher than it otherwise would.

The tenure closed at 396.

The two-year, though, closed at 472.

So you can kind of see how inverted the yield curve is.

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