Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Well, hello and welcome to the Dividend Cafe. I am

your host, David Bonson, managing partner, chief investment officer of the Bonson Group, who has

the distinct privilege of every Friday bringing you my macro commentary on whatever topic I select.

And I had a topic selected a couple of weeks ago that I was going to write about this week, kind of unpacking more

of this subject of bubbles and issues related to valuation and where we sit in the market

and looking at the history of bubbles, which I think is just an incredibly important topic.

And there's going to be some nuances in what I say about

this. But then a week ago, on Saturday night, to be precise, the announcements came through

that the United States had launched its own Operation Midnight Hammer, and what an operation

it was.

Watching the news late into the night Saturday and absorbing everything throughout Sunday

and then the way in which you would have expected markets may end up responding earlier

in the week, I thought this may not be a good week to do a special issue about bubbles.

Let's definitely keep it in the Middle East.

Let's look at what's going to be happening with oil, with markets, with volatility,

as ongoing geopolitical tensions escalate in the aftermath of first Israel's actions in Iran

over the last two weeks and then the United States joining the fray to weaken Iranian capacity

for nuclear capability.

And now I'm really glad that I made the decision to write about this this week,

despite the fact that markets are up massively, despite the fact that oil is down substantially,

despite the fact that nobody looking at market charts this week would believe at all that anything has happened in the Middle East, let alone a high profile, highly newsworthy, highly contentious decision for the Trump administration to aid in and produce U.S. resources towards the elimination

...