📅 On This Day
Bear Stearns' $3.2 Billion Bailout Opens the Door to Crisis
On June 14, 2007, Bear Stearns pledged $3.2 billion to rescue its collapsing High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leverage Fund — a moment the broader market largely shrugged off. Few recognized it then, but income investors would come to mark this date as the opening salvo of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. What followed was the 'Great Dividend Cut' of 2008–2009, which wiped out hundreds of billions in annualized shareholder income as financial sector payouts collapsed.
A liquidity freeze that Wall Street dismissed in 2007 would ultimately reach into the pockets of dividend investors worldwide.
🇺🇸 US
Source: SEC Filings: Bear Stearns Companies Inc. 8-K (June 14, 2007); Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report (2011)
🌍 Around the World
Singapore Offers Global Dividend Investors a Zero Withholding Rate
Singapore's one-tier corporate tax system is a genuine rarity: once a company settles its corporate tax bill, dividends flow to local and foreign individual shareholders alike at a 0% withholding rate — no treaty, no paperwork, no reclaim queue. That efficiency makes Singapore's banks, telecoms, and S-REITs unusually attractive income vehicles for global portfolios. Foreign institutional investors in certain S-REIT income types may encounter a 10% withholding rate, but for individual investors the zero rate holds.
No forms, no reclaims — Singapore's one-tier system simply lets dividend income arrive whole.
🇸🇬 SG
Source: Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore; SGX investor education
🔥 Dividend Streak
Kinder Morgan Promised a Raise, Then Cut Its Dividend 75%
On October 21, 2015, Kinder Morgan's management guided investors toward a 6–10% dividend increase for 2016. Seven weeks later, on December 8, 2015, the company instead slashed its quarterly payout 75% — from $0.51 to $0.125 — as collapsing energy prices and a closed capital market left the dividend as the only large lever to pull. It remains a sobering reminder that a payout funded by debt and equity issuance rather than free cash flow can reverse with startling speed.
When outside capital dries up, a promised dividend increase can become a 75% cut in under two months.
KMI — Kinder Morgan Inc
🇺🇸 US
Source: Kinder Morgan SEC filing (8-K, Dec 2015); The Motley Fool
💡 Did You Know
One 2003 Tax Law Gives Birth to Dividend Growth Investing
For most of US history, dividends were taxed as ordinary income — reaching rates as high as 38.6% in 2002, while long-term capital gains were taxed at just 20%. That gap made dividend stocks a mathematically punishing choice for high-net-worth investors and pushed companies toward buybacks instead. The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 changed everything, creating the 'qualified dividend' classification and dropping the top rate on most corporate dividends from 38.6% to 15% — sparking the modern culture of treating quarterly dividend growth as a core strategy.
A single piece of legislation turned the dividend aristocrat from a tax liability into a portfolio cornerstone.
Source: US Treasury JGTRRA tax provisions; Wikipedia JGTRRA