Welcome to the Dividend 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 Dividend Cafe.

We are back up and running, and I wish I had some news for you about the future Treasury Secretary of the

United States, the National Economic Council Director. There's been a lot of progress of naming

different would-be appointees. I mean, everybody still has to get confirmed, of course,

across various departments, but the Treasury and the

directly economic areas of government are the ones that the Trump transition team has not

made announcements in. Let me just start with the Monday summary of markets, give you kind of the

rundown or where we are, and then I'll give an update as to some of the things

that did take place in the transition over the weekend because it primarily impacts the energy

sector. So in terms of the market today, it opened down about 100 points and then closed the day

down just 55. So the Dow was pretty flattish down just 13 basis points on the day where the S&P was up 39 basis points and the NASDAQ was up 60.

So a little bit of an up day in the broader markets kind of flattish in the Dow.

Energy was the top performing sector and I'm going to get into that a little bit more in a moment.

It was up a little over 1%.

Industrials were the only sector that were down. So 10 out of 11 sectors were positive,

and industrials were only down 17 basis points. The 10-year bond yield, by the way, was down one

basis point on the day, so not much movement, but it closed at 4.41%.

But I think the more interesting thing is that the 30-year bond yield has closed above the Fed funds rate for the first time in two years.

So the yield inversion, the yield curve inversion has officially uninverted up and down across the

yield curve, largely because of the Fed's recent 25 basis rate cut, it brought the effective

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