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

Welcome to the Dividendin Cafe. It is Tuesday, August the 20th. Brian Sightel with you here today in an otherwise fairly quiet day in markets overall. We gave a little bit back here,

but we also had eight days in a row with both the S&P and the NASDAQ positive. So there you have it.

The 10-year yield was down four or five basis points. We closed at 382, and that's sort of normal correlation between stocks as bonds.

And stocks and bonds continues with bond yields a little lower as stocks sell off here a little bit.

But with that, there's a quiet day in the economic calendar today. We did pick up a little bit on the VIX.

So volatility was a little higher. Tomorrow we've got jobless claims. We've got the FOMC minutes out.

And then Friday we'll have Powell speaking at Jackson

Hull and giving his press conference, which is really the largest piece of economic news on the week.

So what I did is just went through the economy generally given the quiet day that it was. So we have

unemployment now at 4.3. That's up from 3 and a half. So, you know, up 80 basis points, which is meaningful.

But just keep in mind, 4.3% is still considered full employment in this country. So employment

continues to be strong, albeit a little cooler. We've got GDP estimates in the 2 to 2.4% range.

So still, you know, positive and not recessionary. Earnings growth, which has just come out, closed around 12% higher, 12.4% with revenue growth

at 5. So positive things on corporate profits and corporate earnings. And then along with that,

just general barometer of overall economic activity, there was a 35-page chartbook from Apollo going through

everything from things like New York City Broadway show tickets to air travel, traffic,

national income tax receipts, things like credit card spending or the consumer spending like

they were, and then just low bankruptcy rates and low charge-offs on debt, there's 30 pages of this stuff.

And almost every single metric is showing that the economy is a pretty strong overall.

It doesn't mean it's perfect, and it doesn't mean that there's not cracks in the dam or anything,

but I think it's positive.

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