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 the Monday edition of Dividing Cafe.

We're recording a little later than normal Monday because I am actually in Greenbrier, West Virginia,

at a corporate executive summit, and they had a massive storm over the last hour that took out Wi-Fi and things like that.

So we're pretty sure that we're able to record right now and that I'm not just speaking into a black box for no reason.

Hopefully you're getting this video and everything has come together okay, but check out

Dividoncafe.com for all the things that went into today's Dividendon Cafe.

The markets were up for the fourth day in a row.

The Dow was up 176 points.

Do I believe that they announced a quantitative tapering slowdown,

slowing down the pace at which they're removing liquidity out of financial markets

and that it's a coincidence that the market went up four days in a row after doing so.

I don't think it's a coincidence.

I also don't know that I think it's the entirety of the explanation.

And it was a question somebody had asked me as far as what I thought the impact on debt

and equity markets would be real estate as well, for that matter, both commercial and residential.

And I'll say to you all the same thing I said in Dividendon Cafe today and said to this gentleman.

I think that largely markets will respond when it is a surprise, when it was not fully expected or baked in.

And clearly them going from $60 billion a month of tapering or tightening their balance sheet down

to $25 billion a month was not fully expected.

Is it a needle mover?

We'll see. There's other factors that

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