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

Good evening and welcome in to Dividend Cafe. This is Tuesday, December the 16th.

Brian Saitel is with you here today for your daily recap on a mixed day overall at markets.

The NASDAQ was slightly positive. Dow was down two-thirds of a percent. S&P was down a quarter of a percent.

Across the stock market and the different indices, a lot of it was to do with some varying different economic numbers that we got on the day. I'll go through

each of them. Bonds actually rallied a little bit, and again, it was attributable to some of the

economic data that I'll mention, but the tenure was down three bases points that we closed at 4.15.

We've been hovering in this 415 level now for quite some time. But let's go through the economic stuff first,

because I think there's a lot to go through. And then we can talk a little bit about some correlations

between what David is in the written version between dot com era of the 90s and then today's

AI paradigm. And then, of course, the Q&A session. But so here's what happened. Today we got

non-farm payrolls that actually beat on the day. We were expecting 50,000 new jobs. We actually got 64,000. That's for the month of November. Remember government shutdown delayed a lot of stuff, but the data is now fresh, so we're getting real numbers. So that's good. We got more jobs created in the month of November. The second piece, though, was the actual unemployment rate itself in the report.

There's a lot of different factors that go into this actually ticked up two-tenths of a percent.

So more than expected.

We got from 4.4% unemployment in the United States to now 4.6%.

This is actually the highest going back to September of 2021. So the highest in about four

years and is something that the Fed pays super close attention to. Again, they're weighing their two

mandates. They have got to keep rates high enough to avoid inflation and they've got to keep

rates low enough to not necessarily spur employment,

but to keep a level. And right now unemployment is ticking up a decent amount. So if you think about

September of 2021, that was only about, what was that a year, maybe 16 months since the peak of COVID.

So that's a long way back from where we were all the way back up to that level. And I don't know

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