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

Well, hello and welcome to a very special Monday Dividing Cafe where normally on Mondays we go around the horn with, of course, market action, but also

public policy, oil and energy, the Fed, housing, a number of different categories, the big economic

data of the day and the week. And we're going to do a lot of that still this week, but that

sort of public policy category,

which is where we usually incubate some of the political discussion,

various things happening in the Beltway that might be pertinent to what's happening in the economy

in our portfolios.

It's interesting that an earlier iteration of this very weekly material podcast,

the writing, the video, we actually called the DC today on purpose because Dividing Cafe has been

our longtime investment vehicle for writing weekly commentary.

And the D.C. today was meant to be a sort of play on Dividendon Cafe combined with

the kind of Beltway activity, Washington, D.C.

And so there's always been a juxtaposition in my writing and my thinking between the

political policy, governmental sphere, and what's happening in the economy, markets,

and all of it to some takeaway that's relevant to investors.

It just is kind of particularly noteworthy today for the very obvious reason that one of the

most significant events in American political history did formally take place yesterday,

and that, of course, was the removal of himself of President Joe Biden

from the re-election effort. We have gone through a whole primary. He was essentially uncontested

in the primary and owns all of the delegates, a little fun fact trivia that I promise you will come up in some

trivial pursuit game or family contest or maybe just bar bragging rights in 30 years.

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