📅 On This Day
King Fahd's Ascension Quietly Shaped Decades of Dividend Growth
On June 13, 1982, Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became the fifth King of Saudi Arabia, inheriting and deepening a petrodollar recycling strategy that funneled billions in oil revenues into U.S. Treasuries and Western markets. For income investors, the ripple effects were profound: that steady flow of foreign capital helped structurally suppress long-term interest rates, handing American corporations the cheap cost of capital that underwrote the sweeping buyback and dividend growth programs of the 1980s and 1990s.
The quiet machinery of petrodollar recycling was, in its way, one of income investing's unlikely benefactors.
🇸🇦 SA
Source: Washington Post (June 14, 1982); Saudi Royal Court Archives
🌍 Around the World
One Unfiiled Form Costs Foreign US Investors Millions Each Year
Foreign investors in U.S. equities face a default 30% dividend withholding tax — but filing a single W-8BEN form with their broker reduces that rate to 15% or lower under most tax treaties. The form is valid for three years and is purely administrative, yet millions of dollars in treaty benefits go unclaimed annually. Beyond the tax mechanics, the U.S. stands apart culturally: American boards treat the quarterly dividend as a near-sacred commitment, willing to cut costs or take on debt before ever reducing it.
No other major market matches the U.S. conviction that a quarterly dividend, once set, must never be touched.
🇺🇸 US
Source: IRS Publication 515; S&P Dow Jones Indices Dividend Aristocrats methodology
🔥 Dividend Streak
Canada's Banks Show Why Payment Streaks and Increase Streaks Differ
Bank of Montreal has paid a dividend every year since 1829 — yet its consecutive-increase streak stands at only around 24 years, because Canadian banks chose to freeze rather than cut dividends during the 2008 crisis and again under a regulator order during COVID. That distinction between paying and raising is everything in streak analysis. Canada's only two true Dividend Kings, Canadian Utilities and Fortis, have each just passed 50 years of increases — a bar the country's 'Aristocrat' label, requiring just five years, barely hints at.
BMO's record since 1829 is a testament to resilience; its ~24-year increase streak is a reminder that freezing isn't growing.
BMO — Bank of Montreal
🇨🇦 CA
Source: Dividend Power; The Motley Fool Canada
🔥 Dividend Streak
Canada's Banks Show Why Payment Streaks and Increase Streaks Differ
Bank of Montreal has paid a dividend every year since 1829 — yet its consecutive-increase streak stands at only around 24 years, because Canadian banks chose to freeze rather than cut dividends during the 2008 crisis and again under a regulator order during COVID. That distinction between paying and raising is everything in streak analysis. Canada's only two true Dividend Kings, Canadian Utilities and Fortis, have each just passed 50 years of increases — a bar the country's 'Aristocrat' label, requiring just five years, barely hints at.
BMO's record since 1829 is a testament to resilience; its ~24-year increase streak is a reminder that freezing isn't growing.
BMO — Bank of Montreal
🇨🇦 CA
Source: Dividend Power; The Motley Fool Canada
💡 Did You Know
A 1929 Paper on Preferred Stock Remains the Field's Definitive Work
George Heberton Evans Jr. published 'The Early History of Preferred Stock in the United States' in the American Economic Review in March 1929 — just before the crash that would make preferred stock's crisis-era role more relevant than ever. The paper traced the instrument from its canal-company origins through the railroad era, charting how an ad hoc workaround became a standard pillar of corporate finance. Nearly a century on, no scholar has written a more authoritative account.
Published on the eve of the Great Crash, Evans's work captured preferred stock's anatomy just as the world was about to stress-test it.
US
Source: JSTOR; American Economic Review