The Dividend Cafe - Monday - September 14, 2026

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/4dB7zsq David Bahnsen hosts the Monday Dividend Cafe from the Newport Beach studio, recaps the show’s weekly content cadence, and reviews a relatively calm market day after a volatile weekend. Nasdaq and S&P finished down about 0.5% with semiconductors down 5.6%, tied to a weekend letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging major AI labs to slow development and seek regulation, with support from Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Google’s AI leadership. Bahnsen notes heightened volatility, a brief 10-year yield move above 5%, and sector performance led by communication services while technology lagged. He says credit spreads remain benign but will be key to watch. He covers August CPI (0.4% headline, 0.3% core), elevated PPI (5.4% y/y), tanker shipping up ~300% amid Red Sea/Strait of Hormuz disruptions, cooling housing markets, the Fed meeting with an 86% implied hike probability, and WTI crude above $100 after a Saudi pipeline shutdown. 00:00 Welcome Back Monday 01:08 Program Cadence Explained 03:24 Market Selloff Recap 04:30 Anthropic AI Warning 07:28 Volatility and Credit Signals 09:05 Policy and AI Regulation 09:45 Inflation CPI and PPI 10:55 Shipping and Housing Cooling 12:04 Fed Meeting Rate Decision 13:18 Oil Surge and Wrap Up Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividing Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Well, hello and welcome to the Monday edition of the Dividendon Cafe. I am your host, David Bonson. As many of you astute viewers will note, I am back in the Newport Beach studio where I have recorded thousands of dividend cafes over the years. I don't know if it's thousands, it's a lot. But not recording a lot these days here, but it's really nice to be here. And I have a few things we need to talk about today. It ended up being, I think, a pretty non-dramatic Monday,

although the dramatic tone of the weekend was much more severe. Let me do this. First, remind you all that if you missed the Divida Cafe on Friday, there was a reflection on 9-11, actually on the 25th anniversary of the 9-11, terrorist attacks and going through those reflections from the vantage point of an investor, and then from the vantage point of an American, and finally, some personal reflections. And so if you miss the Divinity Cafe, either the written version, the video, the podcast, whatever it is, you like, please feel free to check that out.

It does tee up a reminder for me, something I want to do at least once a quarter, and I forget to do it a lot, which is just for those of you who are newer to the Divident Cafe, or trying to figure out the program. We have a very regimented, disciplined kind of cadence. It's very consistent. It's very knowable and understandable. But if you're new and you don't believe how remarkably disciplined I and my content team are, you wouldn't know that what we basically do is each and every week on Monday.

We do exactly what we're about to do, which is I do a divinity cafe where I'm going through various topics from the economy, state of markets, public policy, the Fed, oil, housing, and we just go around those different topics and give a recap of things that are relevant happening and we do it each and every week on Monday. There is a video, there is a podcast, there is the written out article at dividend cafe.com. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we do a daily recap where it could be one paragraph of a reflection on something in the markets in the economy that is on my mind. It could be one paragraph of something that's on Brian Sightel's mind, my co-CIO and partner. We do a little recap of the market for the day, key economic data

that came out that day, and then usually answering a question that's come in from a reader. Brian does a podcast. There's no video and that written version, and that goes every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Then finally, on Friday, the real traditional kind of staple of Dividing Cafe is a weekly commentary that I have written each and every week since the third week of September in 2008. So we're coming up on our 18-year anniversary next week, which will not coincidentally be the 18-year anniversary coming up here in a few days of when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008. And that's when all this weekly commentary started. So Friday is that kind of major long-form commentary. Again, there is a written article. There is a video. There is a podcast. So that's the Monday through

Friday program. And I hope it all makes sense. And I just wanted to reiterate it for you. And now I wanted to tell you that NASDAQ futures down pretty consistently from last night when futures market opened until this morning of over 300 points to the down. It got even worse at one point, several percentage points, a couple percentage points, I should say, to the downside at the low. And then it didn't really open that badly, but it opened down over 1% of the NASDAQ. It closed down only 52 basis points, half of a percent for the NASDAQ, half of a percent to the downside for the S&P. The Dow closed down 29 basis points, so let's call it a quarter of a point, 100,000. 50 points. Not that bad, but we're going to talk in a moment about what the catalyst to that was,

and the semiconductor space was down today 5.6%. So you did see quite a bit of violence within the sort of pick and shovel aspect to the AI story. What happened over the weekend, there is a Lincoln Dividin Cafe, is that the CEO of Anthropic, just lovely guy at a party, Dario Amade wrote a piece more or less suggesting that the AI thing is getting really scary, really dangerous. They, of course, make the famed language model quad. Anthropic is preparing to go public for into the trillion-dollar valuation range and said that with the escalation of fears to wrecking havoc on society that all the major frontier

AI Labs need to get together and slow down a little bit. And so it was sort of this Jerry McGuire style letter and it got a rather quick response of support from his major competitors, Elon Musk, who of course with Space X and their purchase of XAI bought, runs GROC and then Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which owns Chat, which runs ChatGBTGBT, and then the head of Google's efforts here also chimed in. So all of these guys were on board with the fact that we need some regulation to keep the robots from destroying all of us. And I want to say that the ideological answer to this, or at least my own ideological response,

I'm going to cover in my Capital Record podcast that will go out tomorrow because I think it's more appropriate there. The investment side of it, it's understandable why the semiconductor space would drop. I don't think there's a way right now to fully process where we are with this. And from an investment standpoint, does this really lead to more regulatory capture for the big companies to kind of squeeze out some smaller? Does it lead to a real slowdown in CAPEX? Are they trying to ban open source, which would be?

much cheaper forms of AI development. There's a lot to kind of unpack there. I want to watch how some of this unfolds in the days ahead. And I haven't made my mind up yet. I'm thinking about doing a Dividy Cafe Friday that unpacks this in much more granular detail from an investor standpoint, what risks it invites, and more importantly, what risks it suggests. But what I'm already doing is a Capital Record podcast to capture the, I guess the way I think about this outside of the investor Lane, and I'll leave it there. So look, we don't know a ton, 48 hours after this letter was published, but I will say that there's a more present and measurable risk in the AI narrative than there was, and that's not a surprise, and you saw some of that enhanced volatility, and there was already

a lot of volatility in that space, and so that's what you saw today. Now, speaking of volatility, the consumer discretionary sector now has 75% of the stocks in that sector down to a 20-day low. So you've seen some kind of heightened volatility in certain elements of the market. A lot of it related to borrowing cost, bond yields, which impacts valuations. The 10-year-tay briefly did pass 5%. It closed at 4.987%. So basically, let's call it 499, up one basis point on the day. The top performing sector today was communication services up 2.79.

There were just a couple names that you could argue were beneficiaries of a lot of the hubbub today that lifted that whole space higher. Healthcare was up 1.35%, a little rally in a lot of the defensives, but then the worst performing today was not surprisingly technology down 1.67%. I'm asked a lot from a market standpoint based on my view of where the vulnerabilities are, when is it going to go from a little bit more volatility to something that we materially see is having an impact across the economy, across the stock market, et cetera, out of this AI story. And I do believe that credit markets are what we'll tell you.

Credit markets are not saying anything yet. I mean, the double B spreads are really quite low. Most credit spreads are pretty benign. But I'd be very surprised. if we don't end up having a credit market catalyst at some point, it hasn't come yet. So on the public policy front, we know Anthropics warning of AI doom. A lot of Democrat leaders, policymakers, electeds, and senior advisors hosting a one-day conference last week. And it does seem that there is a growing bipartisanship around some of the doomerism in a lot of this. It's worth watching. I think it's more worth watching after the midterms because I'm going to believe people more about what they say they're afraid of after the midterms than I do right now

where I think people might not be as serious. What else do I want to cover? Okay, the August headline CPI that came out late last week rose 0.4% on the month. All right. X, food and energy, the core was up 0.3. So headline was in line with expectations. Core was a little bit higher than expected. Energy prices are up 16.3% on the year, year, year over year. Food prices, 2.7%. Food at home prices, 3.4%. Health insurance, 8.5. Airlines, 23% airline fares. Hotel prices, 2.9. Car repair, 5.2. lot of different outcomes, but nevertheless, very practical type stuff. You know, very few of these things are not things that every day Americans are buying. The 5.4% year-over-year PPI number, the producer price index, doesn't bode well for the direction

of consumer prices, because often producer prices, which reflect key inputs, are going to end up having a lag effect impact into consumer prices. So that's why we bring that up a lot, I think it's very relevant. Speaking of producer prices, tanker shipping, it's a subset of overall shipping cargo. The whole entire space is obviously not in this kind of an Armageddon, but tanker shipping is up 300% in the last two months, obviously behind Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea disruption. Shipping lanes are quite constrained. There's a gazillion vessels that are just simply unwilling to operate right now, and that's

pushed tanker shipping way higher. There's a fascinating chart in Dividingcafe.com today of the top 10 U.S. buyers markets. You think of just the explosion of prices of demand in certain cities over the last four or five years, like Nashville, Miami, Houston, Orlando, et cetera. And now you see a doubling of the sellers in those markets relative to buyers in Nashville. it's far worse than even that. And it's just a byproduct of how hot things were. And now the inevitable cooling and reversion has changed those numbers.

So the Fed is meeting this week. The Federal Open Market Committee will begin deliberations tomorrow, Tuesday. And then they will conclude Wednesday and not only make their announcement, but then Chairman Kevin Warsh will do a national press conference. And it is right now at 86% implied probability in the futures market that they will hike rates. It's just too high of a number for me to say I don't agree with the futures, the week of. There is still a part of me that is going to be rather perplexed on what he is inviting on himself in terms of tension with the White House. But I'll leave that alone.

It appears a rate hike is coming this week. And the question is, does this actually bring rates down as they hike rates on the longer end of the curve, flattening the yield curve? They expect it. It's what markets are likely expecting. But I will point out that, you know, the 10-year already getting up near 5%, the 30-year, well above 5.3%, these things seem prone to potentially come down anyways. So we will be watching it closely, I assure you. Finally, oil today up almost another 2%. It was up over 9% last week.

So WTI crude, comfortably above $100 closing today at 101.77. You have the Saudi Arabian East-West pipeline that they have shut down the last several days. That's taking 4 million barrels a day offline and just a lot of volatility and uncertainty out of the Strait of Hormuz. Let me leave it there. Plenty for you to chew on. a few links and other things at the dividend cafe.com.

But obviously, the Monday action today, a lot to cover. Thank you for listening. Thank you for reading. Thank you for watching. The Monday Dividendon Cafe will be with you all week as always. Thanks. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with High Tower Securities LLC, member Finra and SIPC, and with High Tower Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor

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