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

Welcome to Dividend Cafe. It is Thursday, June the 13th, and I'm here with you from the greatest city on earth in New York City, where I'll be for several days for client meetings and such.

But kind of a mixed day in markets, generally positive. The Dow actually closed lower by about 88 points, but that was at the highs of the session, more or less.

We were down almost 300 at one point earlier in the session, but both the

NASDAQ and the S&P closed in modest territory, positive territory. So, so generally positive. But the

bigger move, I guess on the day was more in bond land, where you had the 10-year yield drop about

14 basis points down to 425 on tens. And so this move lower in bond yields and rates is because of a few

things. Yesterday's CPI number was weaker than expected, which is a good thing. Inflation's moving

lower. And then today we had wholesale prices at the producer price index level actually deflate

for the month of May. So we were down negative 0.2% for May.

And that was expected a 0.1% increase.

And so that's quite a bit weaker on the PPI number.

Core PPI was at 0% and we were expecting 0.2%.

So these are good signs on inflation.

It's moving in the right direction. That puts

year over year PPI at 2.2 percent and it puts core at 3.2 percent. So both, you know, lower than

expected. I'll call that good news on the day. Initial jobless claims were actually weaker than

expected. We had a 242 print, and we were expecting

225. So cooling inflation, more than expected, and now a weakening labor market is why you're

getting those interest rates to move lower in markets. Again, you know, even though the FOMC meeting

ended yesterday, and they talked about higher for longer and their dot plots increased a little bit.

The data that we're now getting real time is more indicative of tightening cycle actually

...