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

Welcome back to Dividend Cafe this Thursday, June the 12th. Brian Saitel with you here on yet another positive day here in markets.

We had the Dow up 101 points, which

is a quarter of a percent. The S&P was up.38 percent and NASDAQ was up a quarter of a percent.

So broadly speaking, a pretty good trading day. We closed near the highs for the session. We

had some weakness in treasury yields, meaning bond prices rose and yields fell. Ten year was down five bases, points closed at 436. The dollar was also slightly weaker today, and there's a reason for both of those things, since they tend to go hand in hand. Lower interest rates tends to lead to weaker currencies. But today we had a producer price index number, PPI, that was

weaker than expected, both on headline and core. It was up just one-tenth of a percent for the

month of May. As you remember from yesterday, the CPI number was the same. And so it's a repeat

on the wholesale input side here on producer prices. And that's a good thing for inflation. That is why interest rates came down a little bit. It gives the Fed a little bit more breathing room if they need to lower interest rates, which I suspect they will a few times before the end of the year. Call it 50 basis points is what's been priced in. But that was the larger piece of news. The other thing was initial jobless

claims today. We've been watching this now. This is the fourth week in a row where they've just

started to creep a little higher. It's not above a level where I think is a cost for a big concern,

but I know the Fed pays attention into this stuff. But we got a 248 print on the day, which was

slightly higher than expected.

And that puts the four-week moving average, which is a long enough period of time to start

drawing some conclusions of a slightly weakening labor market. Back to about where we saw in the

summer of 2023. If you remember in 22, interest rates went up from zero to five percent. And the

talk then was, of course, going to cause a recession that never happened. But you did see a little bit of weakness and jobless claims back then. And we're back to about those levels. So it's just worth paying attention to. And then what David had in there today was more about the U.S. China trade talks and what we're really talking about. A lot of this is just optics.

And as I've said on the media hit a couple of times yesterday, the fact that we're making

progress and that there's open dialogue and the fact that things have de-escalated and one way

the other, they'll be given, they'll be take. But we'll settle on something is why markets are

behaving better. This isn't just about China giving

some rare earth minerals for more ability for Chinese students to attend U.S. universities. It definitely

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