Here's a graph I was surprised by. It shows the annual growth rate for the real dividends on the S&P 500 index over the past 10-years. Recent numbers are approaching 4% (ie. real dividends today are 4% per year higher than 10 years ago).
Aside from the big dip during the Great Recession in 2008/2009, the rate had been trending this way since the dot-com-bust.
Here is some raw data: the *real monthly* dividend is at 0.0104 on the S&P 500 right now, vs a high of 0.0118 in Jan09. In Jan99, it was 0.0082 (dot-com peak), then fell to a trough of 0.0073 in Jul03 (same as Oct02 ten years ago). Interestingly, the low in Jan94 was 0.0072, very similar to the value ten years later in 2003.
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