Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to the Monday edition, a Dividend Cafe. Yes, it is a special edition. I like to say that all the time. But when you're talking about

these kind of markets, I think that it becomes a bit more special. It certainly becomes more

important. Let's never forget that the dividend cafe started because of these days that

create extraordinary market volatility and warrant some degree of additional commentary.

And there's a number of things I want to say about the market.

First of all, let's just set the table as to what has gone on and then talk about what

has caused it.

I'm going to go through most of the normal things we cover in Divida Cafe today,

but there's a need to give the overall context behind what's happened in the markets.

Those who were paying attention to futures on Sunday night and certainly early morning

Monday, which hopefully is almost none of you, but obviously was me, saw that the

market was set to drop over a thousand points. At the open today, it had been down over

a thousand points Thursday, Friday, and there had been a significant sell-off in a lot of

the tech space here in the States. That had really started July,

it's about the second week of July or so, and yet it accelerated last week and there were

some fundamental things behind it. And then just that, as I wrote about Divida Cafe on Friday,

that valuation story catching up where a lot of these

overvalued things were getting hit. When you wake up to the words of the Niki, to the

announcement of the Niki, the Japanese stock market, being down 12.5% in one day, that is not just simply a U.S. valuation correction.

Initially, the Niki opening down on Sunday night, our time Sunday or Monday morning in Tokyo,

that could be perceived as, okay, there's a kind of knock-on effect

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