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 this week's Dividend Cafe. I am your host, David Bonson. I am recording from just outside the Reagan Museum and Library here in

beautiful Southern California. It has been a whirlwind of a week. I am about to give my fifth

speech in five days in four states, is that right, here at the Reagan Foundation Economic Forum.

And I'll share more about some of that next week, but this really is today a very, very important

topic.

And it's one I extremely enjoyed writing.

And I really want everyone who doesn't care about monetary policy, who doesn't care about the Fed to still listen

in the sense that I think what we're talking about has become a very important topic in terms of

ongoing aspirational economic health and stability in the midst of what's become a very politicized issue,

and I'm hoping to bring some clarity to the subject. The catalyst to this debate discussion

about Fed independence is political, as I will make clear in a moment, and the ability to have a sensible and grown-up

conversation about it requires nuance and nuances the enemy of, well, everybody and everything

these days, but it's not going to stop me. I am very excited for our new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, for now. I made a comment to a client

who asked the question in Dallas this week. You know, are you excited about Kevin Warsh

coming? And I said, I very much am. But of course, my excitements have led to disappointments

many times in areas of public policy over my adult life.

So I always brace for disappointment.

But one of the big controversies about Kevin Warsh coming in, he was confirmed into this role a week ago.

President Trump was there.

And then I heard media people say, like, oh, they shook hands

and they were smiling and are we really going to get an independent Fed? And that question came up

...