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. This is Thursday, September the 19th. And Brian Sightale with you here as we get closer to the end of the week. And after yesterday's 50 basis point recut by the Fed, we got a big follow through in markets today with a nice rally, essentially across the board in risk assets. The Dow was up over 500 points. So we closed up 522. SMP was up back to all-time highs, up about a

percent, 1.7 percent. Nasdaq was up an incredible two and a half percent. So risk gone.

Bond land didn't budge. The 10-year stayed exactly where it was at 371. And the yield curve is now getting a little steeper for

once, which makes sense. They're starting to lower that short-term rate. So there you have it.

The press conference following yesterday's meeting, Powell basically walked back some of the

excitement about it. He basically said, don't expect 50 basis points as an expectation

going forward. When we have these meetings, this is where we're starting, and then we'll take

data as it comes, which makes sense. And again, we're dealing with an employment labor market that is

deteriorating in some ways. The job openings numbers have dramatically decreased back to more normal levels. And it's hard to say

if that is going to continue into a more dangerous territory. And then you have unemployment

that has risen now 80 basis points from 3.5 to 4.2, roughly percent. So those things are

coming with the Fed starting to lower interest rates, but there isn't a free

lunch there. They're doing that because there's risk baked into what's going on into these markets.

But some of the economic news, we had initial jobless claims actually beat. We got a 219 number

versus a 230 consensus. So again, labor is softening, but it isn't falling out of bed. And they're just

taking interest rates from something overly restrictive to something more neutral. The other thing that

they did talk about was that the neutral rate or the terminal rate of where they're going to get

to is likely going to be higher than it was pre-pendemic. And so it's not like they're planning on taking this back to zero. That's fine to say, of course, we don't know what the future will hold, whether they'll have to do something more dramatic. But for now, again, all these things, all these things do matter. The markets are perceiving this as this is the soft landing that it's been looking for it, and that's the moment that we're in.

So you had a nice day there in markets. There was housing numbers out today that were a little weaker than expected, although prices were actually up a little bit, up 3% over the year,

which is good. And then you had a Philly Fed manufacturing index, which was about in line. It was

slightly higher than expected, but it was back

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