📅 On This Day
ECB's 'Whatever It Takes' Becomes Reality, Steadying European Markets
On September 6, 2012, the European Central Bank launched its Outright Monetary Transactions program, pledging to buy sovereign bonds of stressed eurozone nations with maturities of one to three years. The announcement operationalized President Mario Draghi's famous vow from two months prior and effectively ended the acute phase of the eurozone debt crisis. Bond yields in Spain and Italy fell sharply, bank stocks rallied, and European dividend payers that had been teetering on the edge began to breathe again.
Three words from Draghi, then three letters from the ECB — and a continent's dividend income was quietly rescued.
🇩🇪 DE
Source: American Economic Association; ECB
🌍 Around the World
Norway's Dividend Bounty Comes With a 25% Withholding Catch
Norway's energy, shipping, seafood, and commodities sectors can deliver generous dividend income — but foreign shareholders face a 25% standard withholding rate on those payments. A U.S.-Norway tax treaty reduces that to 15%, often applied at source for major ADRs like Equinor (EQNR), though the process is not universal. For IRA holders, that 15% treaty-rate withholding is permanently surrendered, a meaningful drag at the high yield levels Norwegian energy names can offer.
Norway's Skatteetaten processes excess-withholding refund claims within 6–12 months — relatively swift by European standards.
EQNR — Equinor ASA ADR
🇳🇴 NO
Source: Oslo Børs; PwC Tax Summaries
🔥 Dividend Streak
F&C Investment Trust Has Paid Dividends Every Year Since 1868
F&C Investment Trust (LSE: FCIT) has maintained an uninterrupted dividend payment streak dating back to its founding in 1868 — a record of consistency that has survived two World Wars and the 2008 financial crisis alike. As of FY2024, the trust has also raised its dividend for 53 consecutive years, earning it AIC Dividend Hero status. The closed-end fund structure, which allows income to be smoothed across volatile cycles, is a meaningful structural advantage that operating companies simply cannot replicate.
Fifty-three years of consecutive increases — and the payments started before the Eiffel Tower was built.
FCIT — F&C Investment Trust PLC
🇬🇧 GB
Source: Association of Investment Companies (AIC) Dividend Heroes list; BMO Investment Trust factsheets
💡 Did You Know
Jackson Hole Became Central Banking's Biggest Stage Thanks to Trout
The Federal Reserve's Jackson Hole symposium began in 1978 as a modest Kansas City Fed conference on agricultural trade. By 1982, organizers wanted a marquee name to elevate the agenda — and knowing that Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had a fondness for fly fishing, they chose a Wyoming mountain valley near some of the finest trout streams in the region to lure him in. It worked, and Volcker's attendance set a precedent that transformed a regional farm forum into the most consequential gathering on the central-banking calendar.
Bernanke, Draghi, and Powell all used this stage to move markets — but it started with one man's love of fishing.
🇺🇸 US
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City; Yahoo News; Marketplace