The number of U.S. companies acting to cut their dividend payments increased from 28 in January 2014 to 32 in February 2014, as it appears that the U.S. economy continued to experience recessionary conditions.
At present, we would describe the U.S. economy as experiencing a microrecession, where there is some economic contraction underway that is too limited in severity, scope or duration to fully qualify as a recession by to the standards of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Going by historic dividend announcement data, we've observed that condition is evident whenever 10 or more publicly-traded companies announce that they are cutting their dividends in any given month.
That outlook is consistent with what we've recently observed with weekly new jobless claims, where we've seen the trend of improvement established since 23 February 2013 flatten out since the end of 2013, but have not yet seen a recessionary pattern take hold that would break the overall trend at present. The overall pattern we observe at present is better described as one of stagnant economic growth.
Data Source
Standard & Poor. Monthly Dividend Action Report. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 4 March 2014.
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
ironman at politicalcalculations
Thanks in advance!
Closing values for previous trading day.
This site is primarily powered by:
CSS Validation
RSS Site Feed
JavaScript
The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.
Other Cool Resources
Blog Roll
