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 Thursday, May the 29th. Brian Sightel is with you here from our West Palm Beach, Florida office.

On a positive day in markets,

although far from the highs we saw in the futures last night, we ended up closing up on the Dow about 117 points. S&P was up for tens of a percent, as was the NASDAQ. So a mildly positive

day. Yesterday was a somewhat orderly down day. The day before was a big up day. Up down. Up down is where you have a 10-year yields dropped, about five bases points. We closed at 443. So the big news was the U.S. Trade Court, International Trade Court, overruled the existing unilateral tariffs that had been

put in by President Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That's the IEPA.

And markets were positive on that, basically falsely, assuming that these tariffs would all be

walked back. But what wasn't realized was that, of course, there's appeal process that can be stayed, which overturns that overruling, and everything

stays status quo. And then on top of that, there's four other levers that the administration

has to continue to implement or even keep the existing tariffs in place. There's different sections

in the legal code that allows them to do that.

They have backup plans if they need to use them for now with the overruling or the staying of the overruling at this point,

which means that most of these things have been postponed anyway. And so we're trading a bit sideways in all that news.

On the economic side today, we had a few things out. There was a revision to Q1 GDP, which actually

brought it better than it was previously reported. We went from a negative point three to a negative

point two, so a tenth better. That was mainly around increased investment in the

numbers. So I had initial jobless claims. They were a little bit worse than expected. So we're

creeping a little higher on the unemployment side of things. We went up to $240,000 for the week. We

were expecting $225,000. And on top of that that, the continuing claims number is now 1.91 million.

And that is the highest since November of 21.

So employment is hardly softening that these numbers are week to week.

And so we need a whole lot more of them put together to start causing any sort of alarm.

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