📅 On This Day
Reagan's Berlin Challenge Reshapes Dividend Growth for a Generation
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and dared Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. When it fell two years later, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union opened to Western multinationals — what income investors might regard as the single largest expansion of the total addressable market in modern history. The revenue and dividend growth that Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever rode through the 1990s and 2000s traces a direct line back to that moment.
A geopolitical speech in 1987 quietly set the stage for decades of consumer-staples dividend growth.
🇺🇸 US
Source: National Archives; Miller Center, University of Virginia
🌍 Around the World
Australia's Franking System Gives Investors a Tax Puzzle Worth Solving
Australia's dividend landscape is unlike almost any other: when a company pays a fully franked dividend, corporate tax has already been settled, and non-resident investors may owe little or no Australian withholding on that portion. Unfranked dividends, however, face up to 30% withholding — reduced to 15% under the U.S.-Australia tax treaty. For U.S. holders of ADRs like BHP or RIO, the franking credit itself doesn't cross the Pacific, but understanding which slice of a payout is franked is essential to knowing your true after-tax yield.
In IRAs, withholding on unfranked portions is lost permanently — and franking levels can shift period to period.
🇦🇺 AU
Source: PwC Australia Tax Summaries; AusTaxPolicy
🔥 Dividend Streak
AT&T's 36-Year Streak Dies Not From Failure but From Ambition
AT&T had raised its dividend for 36 consecutive years — a Dividend Aristocrat since 1986 — before empire-building caught up with it. More than $100 billion spent on DirecTV and Time Warner ultimately forced a reckoning: when WarnerMedia was spun into Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022, AT&T reset its quarterly payout from $0.52 to $0.2775, a cut of roughly 46%. The streak hadn't crumbled because the core telephone business failed; it crumbled because the capital-allocation discipline that sustained the payout had long since been traded away for acquisitions.
The cautionary lesson: a spin-off can quietly reset even the most storied dividend streak.
T — AT&T Inc.
🇺🇸 US
Source: AT&T investor relations; MarketBeat; 24/7 Wall St.
🔥 Dividend Streak
AT&T's 36-Year Streak Dies Not From Failure but From Ambition
AT&T had raised its dividend for 36 consecutive years — a Dividend Aristocrat since 1986 — before empire-building caught up with it. More than $100 billion spent on DirecTV and Time Warner ultimately forced a reckoning: when WarnerMedia was spun into Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022, AT&T reset its quarterly payout from $0.52 to $0.2775, a cut of roughly 46%. The streak hadn't crumbled because the core telephone business failed; it crumbled because the capital-allocation discipline that sustained the payout had long since been traded away for acquisitions.
The cautionary lesson: a spin-off can quietly reset even the most storied dividend streak.
T — Telus Corp
🇺🇸 US
Source: AT&T investor relations; MarketBeat; 24/7 Wall St.
💡 Did You Know
MLPs Promised Toll-Booth Safety but Were Borrowing to Pay the Toll
During the shale boom of the 2000s, midstream MLPs pitched themselves as bond-like income vehicles — fee-based pipelines insulated from commodity prices, yielding 7–10% with steady distribution growth. What the pitch omitted was that many MLPs were paying out all of their cash flow and funding new construction entirely through fresh debt and equity. When oil prices collapsed in 2014, the cost of that equity soared, the growth model broke, and dozens of MLPs slashed distributions — revealing that the toll booth had been borrowing to pay the toll collector all along.
A high yield sustained by continuous capital raises isn't a toll booth — it's a treadmill.
Source: Alerian MLP Infrastructure Index historical data; Barron's MLP sector analysis