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

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Dividendin Cafe.

I am very excited to tell you that I could not decide what to talk about this week in Dividing Cafe.

So instead, I'm going to talk about seven or eight different things.

I actually had a topic kind of set and got inspired about it as I was taking the train down to D.C.

at the end of the day, Wednesday for a meeting.

And then in a meeting on Thursday, I got inspired to another topic and then changed my mind.

And then on the train coming back from DC to New York Thursday evening, I then got inspired

to another topic.

And then the State of the Union was last night.

And there were a couple other things that sort of went across my radar this week.

And so when all of a sudden done, I just decided to avoid a single topic and

cover a couple of different things. So that's what we're going to do today. This trip to

D.C., by the way, it was a very quick trip. I was literally there total 24 hours at a dinner

meeting Wednesday night. And then Thursday, there was a conference for the

Coolidge Foundation. Many of you will know that Calvin Coolidge was once the president of the

United States. Some of you will also know that he was one of the greatest presidents we've ever

had in the United States. But I digress. But the Calvin Coolidge Foundation, who is chaired by CEO Amity Schlaz, who's a well-known economic historian, a long-time Wall Street Journal writer and a very dear friend of mine and someone whom I adore.

And Amity asked me to do a panel with David Malpas, who is the just immediate past president

of the World Bank. And David served as deputy treasury secretary in the Reagan, Bush,

senior, and Trump administrations. One of those three was actually in State Department,

...