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

Welcome to Dividend Cafe. This is Thursday, December the 12th. Brian Saitel with you here on another inflation-oriented day, I guess, in the market. We got

PPI numbers out on the day. That's the producer price index numbers. And markets were down

a touch, about a half a percent across the board on stock. So the Dow was down 230 points. S&P was

down 0.54 percent. NASDAQ was down 0.6. And the tenure was actually up six basis points, hence the sell-off in equities and the sell-off in bonds. A PPI came out just higher than expected by about a 10th. We got a 0.4% print for the month. We were expecting a 0.3. At least that's on a headline. If you strip out, things like food

and energy was right in line rising at about 0.2%. So some of it have followed through from yesterday.

Both of the numbers on CPI and PPI are not speaking to an advancement or resurgence,

inflation necessarily. They're speaking to more of a normalized number, but something above

the 2% target on the Fed's wish list. If we stay in this high twos to low threes, with continued

strong growth, with continued labor market, resiliency, then I suspect that rates will move

lower, but again, at a much more slower and measured pace.

And that's what's being priced into markets right now.

That said, we did get initial jobless claims above consensus at 242 versus 220.

The employment picture is something to pay attention to as well.

Anything below that 250 level, I believe, is in the clear zone.

I think if it gets above that level, then the Fed pays more attention to it. And again, these are weekly numbers. So just keep that in mind. We get a lot of fresh reads into these job list claims numbers. So with that, we have mixed bag, I would call it. Sell off in stocks and bonds, PPI, a little bit higher than expected or

higher than we would like. Ideally, we'd like inflation and disinflation to ramp up. Some of the

policies and some of the things into next year may do just that. In the meantime, here we are.

There was a Q&A in there about the utility sector that I had written about quite a while ago

as being attractive just from the

backdrop of things like AI and data centers, the comment was more related to just what was once

a defensive and sort of interest rate sensitive sector and boring and mature has become a little

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