Brian Stewart. Welcome to a special Thursday edition of Wall Street lunch in place of Kim's temporary absence.

Great to have you on during the work week. Welcome back. Great to be here.

Glad for the extra chance to talk to everybody. Yes, yes. As are we. So talk to us. Here we are March 13th.

What would you say you're most focused on the markets today? So obviously we started this week

with a big sell-off. There were rising inflation

concerns. This was stoked over the weekend by some comments Trump made about moving into a

transitionary period with the changes that he's making. In his administration, there's rising worry

that he's going to kind of shove the market off a cliff by doing

severe job cuts in the public space and by putting tariffs into place. So the general idea

that Trump is okay with a recession kind of sent people into a panic. The market has stabilized since then.

I mean, one of the good points about going down quickly is the faster you go down, the sooner

you hit bottom. So there's the debate going on about whether we've hit the bottom or whether

we've kind of just settled on a ledge somewhere, just sort of waiting for the next step lower.

And what are you seen out of the markets today? Can you contextualize some of the

movements that you're seeing today for investors? So if we just look at the markets for today,

we're not seeing anything dramatic. It's down again, down about 1% on the S&P 500.

So there hasn't been a major snapback yet. So there's not a wave of buyers coming back to the market.

So there's generally feeling waiting for either the next shoot-a-jop or the next piece of

data to send the market higher or something that's going to give some sort of idea that we've

gotten all the selling out of our system.

So I would look for the Fed next week as a major catalyst.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of earnings coming out.

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