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 Wednesday, May the 8th. And thank you for being with me today.

Another sort of quiet day, really, in trading.

The Dow actually ended up closing up 172 points.

It was marginally higher, basically flat for most of the day and got a little late day rally.

The S&P closed completely unchanged.

And the NASDAQ ended up down, actually, a little bit.

Again, there's really not a lot of economic news this whole week, frankly.

And I think markets are just in a lull waiting for what it will be CPI that will come out next week.

That will certainly move things.

There was a couple of things, though.

There's a Fed survey called Sluz.

It's an opinion.

It's basically a bank manager survey regarding lending standards.

Are they tightening or are they loosening?

What are they seeing and why? And they were slightly tighter for the

month, but not anything meaningful, just citing things like on economic uncertainty and things like

that. It was not a whole lot of market moving news. There was wholesale inventory numbers out today

that were down 0.4% for the month of

March, which gives us a negative 2.3% year over year and counterintuitive sometimes, but wholesale

inventories or a function of economic health. So it's the opposite. So you get increasing

inventories, meaning consumer demand is lower and decreasing with consumer

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