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 Tuesday, March 4th. And Brian Saitel with you here at West Palm Beach on a day that closed lower, although

quite a bit off of the lows for the day, but it was still an ugly day. The Dow was down

670 points. SMP was down almost 1.5%. It's a big drawdown. Nasdaq was the outperformer

technically, which has been the opposite of what we've seen

lately, which was only down about a third of a percent. So we started off the day, actually positive,

and lost momentum, and it ended up closing lower. We made a run at positive territory by

basically about 30 or 40 minutes before the close and then just

fell off into the end. And a lot of this has to do with tariffs. It has to do with interest rates.

It has to do with growth. I think those three factors right now are what's driving markets the most.

Interest rates have come way down. Two year was below 4% meaningfully.

Ten year is at four and a quarter. So we're off quite a bit. And the Fed expectations, just so

you know, have started to move up as far as more rate increases for the year of 2025.

So blessing and disguise potentially, at least on that front, with

interest rates, if that's something that you're paying attention to. But just remember,

if they're decreasing interest rates more, it's because they see lower growth and they're going

to try to make policy more accommodative. So that is definitely not a good thing. We're trying to get

to, in my view,

something around a two to two and a half percent inflation rate and something around three and a half

to call it four, say three and a half percent roughly fed funds rate. That would be a good terminal

rate, which puts it at a one percent real rate, meaning 1% above inflation, if inflation's

2.5 and we're at 3.5. So that's ultimately where I think markets want it to go. And the question

...