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. This is Brian Sightel at the Newport Beach, TBG HQ here in California. It is June the 5th. And thank you for being with me here today.

We actually had a down day in markets and it closed right near the lows, not quite on the lows for the day.

But we had positive momentum in the morning and then just slowly did a stair step on the way down to a negative territory.

The Dow closed down. 108 points. S&P was down half of a percent.

NASDAQ was on eight-tenths of a percent. Bon yields were slightly higher. Ten year was up

about three basis points, but we're at 439 now on yields. Slowly but surely inching lower on

interest rates and the two-year is now down to 3.9 percent. So you've got some lower interest rates across the board year is now down to 3.9%. So you've got some lower interest rates

across the board. Some of that has to do with some softening economic data, not falling off a cliff,

but there was some weaker numbers on the employment front. We had initial job list claims that

came in higher than expected at 247. We were expecting a 230 print. And I've written about

this a few times, but anything south of 250 is considered okay. Once we start getting over 250

consistently, where I think the Fed starts to pay more attention as far as a softening labor market.

For now, we have yet to see that, but it is inching up. We were in the low 200s, then 220s, then 230s, and now we're into the 240s here. So we'll keep an eye on that. Productivity and Q1 declined more than expected. It was down one and a half percent, and a lot of that had to do with just a slow down and some import export around tariffs, but nonetheless,

that's the lowest number that we've seen here in a couple of years, so middle of 22.

And then the trade balance for the month of April narrowed more than expected.

It was negative $61 billion.

That was a big dropper on imports again around tariffs. Actually, that will be a positive thing on GDP calculation because imports detract from that number. And so remember on Q1 GDP, we had a negative 0.2% print. And what is expected now, at least of the Atlanta Fed, is something around a 3.8% positive number for Q2.

And a lot of that will have to do with just oscillations around imports that stopped in Q1

and then resumed in Q2. There was some comments today around why there hasn't been more deals

announced from country to country on different trade deals. Look, your guess is as good as mine.

What I would say, normally, these deals take a very long time to put together because they're very complex.

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