Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of Dividend Cafe.

I'm your host, David Bonson, a wild week as things continue in Iran and market volatility remains enhanced.

And yet with all of the talk about oil prices, the military operation in Iran, the enhanced

market volatility, it occurs to me that there's more than just one thing to talk about.

So what I wanted to do in today's Dividing Cafe is, yes, review Iran, review oil prices,

the impact that is taking place for investors from all of those events in the Middle East,

but also as we kind of get into the 10th week of the year,

as we sit here in the middle of March of 2026, I'm not going to say anything going on is

unprecedented because it is incredibly rare the things that happen in asset markets or the economy

are ever unprecedented. The vast majority of what happens is

precedented. And yet at the same time, shall we say eventful right now. And I am going to today

suggest that there are five different things that play into that right now as we look at the kind of year-to-date activity

in markets and just throughout the economy. And so those five things that we're going to review

and discuss are indeed the Iran War, the state of the economy, particularly in the aftermath of

tariffs, tariff changes, Supreme Court,

where do things stand with jobs and prices just across the economy? Number three, I think that

the private credit story and what's happening in the financial sector is getting an awful

lot of oxygen in the media. Number four, the AI story, what that has done so far this year

for good and for bad in markets and what it is meant for investors and where we stand in the kind

of current state of the artificial intelligence contribution to markets. And the number five,

...