In the end, why bother paying dividends when the fed owns all stock?

Wait what? I wan my dividend... It allows me to be an arrogant spendthrift.

Stock values will certainly go down. Mix that up with how much they went up and subtract the Trump Bump... What a price discovery mess. Meanwhile, We like many others are way long on utility stocks because they always have paid dividends. That stream will be pinched off as utility bills go unpaid. This will have a lasting effect as people don't end up going back to work as expected. About the time people realize they don't have as good a job as they thought they did, we will be moving into the second covid 19 wave.

or stock buy-backs which have allowed many companies to paint the picture of rising earnings per share despite an aggregate earnings or cashflow picture which was basically flat. this is the ibm problem which jim chanos grew wise to

banks cut dividends back in 2008. they came back. airlines have joined banks as being too large to fail. why are we only talking about eliminating dividends and not wiping out shareholder equity in exchange for a government bail-out?

Hi Sechel. I invest in many asset classes all over the world. Some of my favorite stocks are Canadian Banks. The big 5, have all been paying dividends since 1829 to 1870, depending on which of the five you are looking at. The last time one of these Canadian Banks has even lowered a dividend was 1940. It will be interesting to see if any of them will cut their dividends during this crisis.

Benjamin Graham (the "Father of Value Investing") once famously said that "The only reason to own equities is for the dividends."

So, with no dividends, little-or-no-earnings and debt-impaired balance sheets, I would say that if you are not a "completely devoted member of the cult-of-equities", these things are actually quite worthless.

Stock dividends are mathematically identical to stock buybacks, so if you are going to ban one, you should ban the other. That way the employees and managers can keep any profits.

Their stocks go down.

This is two consecutive days of tracking above what this model predicted. Today was supposed to end at 3755 at the high end and we already have hit 4053 by midnight on the east coast. Welcome to April.

But but someone here was pimping doing just that a few weeks ago (XOM).

Good luck.