2023-08 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for August, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $309.70. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $6589.89.

The income for August, 2022 was $219.36, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of August was $6135.89.

My job situation is up in the air. I am not assigned to a project at the moment, so I might be let go. Part of me would be glad to leave, although I have nothing lined up. If I can stay for a couple of more years, I can get some nice benefits. If you leave the company and you are at least 55 years old and you have been with the company for at least ten years, they will provide health insurance for life. Granted, a lot of companies have rescinded benefits. And I really do not like the direction the company is going in; they are a large consulting firm, and they seem to care more about getting clients to use expensive software from the vendors than building robust applications and teaching them how to use technology themselves. Two and a half years is a long time to deal with this stuff. I am sick to death of anything from Microsoft and I would love to stay in tech and never touch anything Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft ever again. And I would love to deal with people where I can say I am tired of Big Tech, and not get the regurgitated response that I have to use big vendor garbage because everybody else does.

If I leave, I will transfer a lot of money from my Roth 401K to my Roth IRA. I might load up on Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF, XYLD. The payout varies from month to month, but I might be able to get $1000 a month from it. I might alternate what I do with that money each month: One month reinvest the dividends and buy more shares of XYLD, then the next month have the dividends go to cash, and use that to buy shares in one of the other ETFs I have. If I could do that, I would be adding as much each year as the yearly contribution limits. The risk is I would be putting a LOT into one fund. I will see what happens in the next few weeks.

If I had ten times as much XYLD as I do now, then I think that could cover my expenses today. Granted, I cannot touch it for a while since it is in an IRA.

There was an article on Yahoo Finance recently saying that if you have assets and/or income to cover your expenses 36 times over then you do not need an annuity. I know a lot of people think annuities are not worth the fees, expenses and restrictions, and the site this article was taken from really pushes annuities. Nevertheless, I thought it was an interesting statistic. My goal is to live off of the dividends and not touch principal.

I saw a few other articles on Yahoo Finance that I thought were interesting. And infuriating. It was more bellyaching about the debt. The kind that only seems to happen when we have a Democrat in the White House.

One of them is ‘Mind-blowing’ US debt binge amid high interest rates is threatening financial stability, Larry McDonald says. This guy runs a site called The Bear Traps Report. I had never heard of this guy before, I just saw an article about him on Yahoo Finance. Where were these guys when Trump and Rethuglicans cut taxes on wealthy in 2017? That had an effect on debt too, and cutting taxes has never made the federal government spend less. There were not too many articles pointing out the conservative bait and switch that happens over and over again, unless you go to Daily Kos. Anyone who tells you the media is liberal is delusional.

Conservatives do the same bait-and-switch all the time with taxes. Cutting taxes (especially on the wealthy) will cause the federal government to cut spending, and shrink the debt, yield more federal revenue, and grow the economy like gangbusters. Likewise, raising taxes or letting cuts expire will cause us to become a third-world country.

Bill Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which raised taxes on the wealthy. Rethuglicans told us it would be doom for us all. Full stop. But I remember the 1990s as being pretty good. Maybe it is because I was in my 20s at the time, but jobs were plentiful, interest rates were low, and people had hope for the future. Conservatives might say that raising taxes on rich people did not crater the economy because of, say, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, or all the spending companies did to prevent their systems from crashing due to the Y2K bug. But that is the bait and switch: they make simple, even simplistic, predictions, and when they do not pan out they appeal to the very complexity they denied when making their predictions.

If you look at some graphs of economic data, it is impossible to see the effects of tax cuts or the expiration of tax cuts. The slopes are not constants, but we do not see the dramatic effects that conservatives always tell us we are going to see any minute now.

Here is a graph of federal expenditures from 2001.01.01 to 2023.04.01. Here they are from 1999.01.01 to 2023.04.01 so we can see the Clinton years as well. Where is the glorious prosperity from the Bush and Trump tax cuts? Where is the crushing depressions from Clinton, Obama and Biden? Hard to say from this graph.

Here is a graph of US GDP from 1993.01.01 to 2023.04.01. If you did not have the years to guide you, I do not think you would know which years were under Democratic or Rethuglican presidents.

Here is a graph of total public debt from 1993.01.01 to 2023.04.01. Yes, Obama’s slope is steeper than Bush’s, but Bush’s is steeper than Clinton’s. And the Trump years look like the Obama years. The graph is noticeably steeper in the Biden years. I guess we are still feeling the effects of that nasty pandemic that Trump told us would miraculously go away in April 2020 [Note 1]. A lot of people think that if a politician has the magic “R” after their name then they know what they are doing. We can safely assume the opposite: Rethuglicans have no idea what they are doing.

And Obama was dealing with the fallout of Bush. I do not think the Great Financial Crisis was caused by tax cuts. Deregulation was the cause. Yes, some of the deregulation happened under Clinton, but then why didn’t the Bush administration undo it? Conservatives are always telling us they know how the world works. At least that what they say until everything falls apart on their watch.

And if the media was even 1% as “liberal” as a lot of people seem to think, none of these bozos would get elected to be dog catcher.

I have written about the conservative bait-and-switch on taxes here and here. And when conservatives realize they have no arguments left, they will usually say, “But don’t you want to pay less tax?” Yes, that would be nice, but I do not think we should pile debt onto ourselves or our posterity. I would like to understand reality as it is as opposed to living in a fantasy world. And if you want to live in a nice country, you have to pay for it.


Note 1: Per this page at CNN (link here, archive here), on March 1 the US was seeing 3 new cases a day; on March 31, it was 19,337 cases a day.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each August from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-08 $6589.89 $309.70 $1236.42 $1053.31
2022-08 $6135.89 $219.36 $1195.56 $1001.53
2021-08 $5069.04 $207.39 $856.33 $899.01
2020-08 $4822.38 $205.28 $790.58 $910.30
2019-08 $4373.04 $63.10 $788.78 $697.89
2018-08 $2970.08 $48.14 $549.51 $540.48
2017-08 $4021.30 $581.69 $558.23 $546.50
2016-08 $3539.84 $522.20 $493.44 $493.92
2015-08 $3084.90 $406.45 $427.26 $422.22
2014-08 $2456.27 $323.94 $348.41 $323.64
2013-08 $1978.40 $305.11 $279.05 $287.74
2012-08 $2110.57 $316.04 $280.53 $277.00
2011-08 $1878.52 $322.35 $254.56 $225.45

Here are the securities and the income amounts for August, 2023:

  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $37.76
  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $202.52
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $18.90
  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $50.52

 

Big Jim says he doesn’t care what women think about his dick, as along as they keep thinking about it.

Painting of The Lute Player by Caravaggio (1571 -1610); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain. Other images from St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED site.

2023-07 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for July, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $474.08. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $6280.19.

The income for July, 2022 was $213.12, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of July was $5916.53.

There is not a whole lot to report this month. My income is still growing nicely. I contributed funds to my Roth IRA last year, but I have not bought anything in the past year. I put some RWR into both of my IRA accounts in 2022. So the income growth is due to more dividends buying more shares. My employment situation is up in the air right now. If I have to leave my current employer, I will be up a creek WRT paying my bills. But I will be able to rollover my Roth 401K, and then I will start raking in bucks that I cannot touch for another ten years or so.

One thing that I have been spending time on is making Org mode files to keep track of artists for this site. I took the Wikipedia pages that categorized artists by country and century, and made them into an Org tree. I did not do all countries and all centuries, just France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Russia and Spain from the 12th to the 19th centuries. A couple of those countries did not have anything until about halfway through. I aleady had some notes for the artists that I had used and I incorporated those.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each July from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-07 $6280.19 $474.08 $1229.50 $1045.79
2022-07 $5916.53 $213.12 $1172.98 $1000.53
2021-07 $4861.65 $199.25 $840.85 $898.84
2020-07 $4617.10 $209.33 $781.84 $898.46
2019-07 $4309.94 $58.79 $818.06 $696.65
2018-07 $2921.94 $736.90 $548.35 $584.94
2017-07 $3439.61 $331.08 $541.56 $541.54
2016-07 $3017.64 $273.36 $464.99 $484.27
2015-07 $2678.45 $263.13 $412.44 $415.35
2014-07 $2132.33 $198.43 $333.77 $322.07
2013-07 $1673.29 $180.57 $258.23 $288.65
2012-07 $1794.53 $219.72 $261.24 $277.53
2011-07 $1556.17 $204.83 $235.96 $211.69

Here are the securities and the income amounts for July, 2023:

  • Vanguard Utilities ETF: $262.73
  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $193.31
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $18.04

 

Big Jim was having WordPress issues while publishing this post, and does not have anything witty at the moment.

Painting of The Bronze Horseman by Vasily Surikov (1848-1916); image from Wikimedia, image assumed to be under public domain.

2023-06 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for June, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $2925.48. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $5806.11.

The income for June 2022 was $3154.20, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of June was $5703.41.

The second-quarter VPU payment did not come until July 5th. Again. I have no idea why Vanguard cannot make all the payouts on time. If it had, then the monthly total would have been 3188.21 and the yearly total would have been 6068.84. I know Vanguard loves to brag they are cheaper, and that costs can have an affect over time, but on the other hand these funds are for when I am too old to work. I would prefer the income be predictable.

The fund I have now is the Vanguard Utilities ETF (VPU). If I were to replace it with another utilties fund, my choices are the iShares U.S. Utilities ETF (IDU) from BlackRock, or the Utilities Select Sector SPDR® Fund (XLU) from State Street (second page here). As much as I hate the payouts being late, VPU in many respects is a better fund: more companies, lower costs, higher yield:

IDU VPU XLU
Num Companies 44 65 30
SEC 30-day Yield 2.61 3.24 3.06
Expense Ratio 0.39 0.10 0.10
Net Yield 2.22 3.14 2.96

Perhaps I will just stick with VPU. Or put more into SDY, since there might be a lot of overlap with that fund anyway. As it is, my twelve-month moving average has been above $1000 for an entire year. This would not even cover my rent, and that is before taxes (some of my accounts are tax-free, some are tax-deferred).

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each June from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-06 $5806.11 $2925.48 $1140.38 $1024.04
2022-06 $5703.41 $3154.20 $1190.56 $999.37
2021-06 $4662.40 $2162.36 $861.08 $899.68
2020-06 $4407.77 $1957.12 $778.78 $885.91
2019-06 $4251.15 $2244.44 $959.55 $753.16
2018-06 $2185.04 $863.49 $319.68 $551.12
2017-06 $3108.53 $761.91 $539.42 $536.73
2016-06 $2744.28 $684.76 $464.00 $483.42
2015-06 $2415.32 $612.21 $411.83 $409.95
2014-06 $1933.90 $522.86 $333.10 $320.58
2013-06 $1492.72 $351.48 $257.79 $291.91
2012-06 $1574.81 $305.84 $260.85 $276.29
2011-06 $1351.34 $236.50 $235.38 $203.23

Here are the securities and the income amounts for June, 2023:

  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $195.52
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $16.77
  • SPDR S&P Dividend ETF: $912.01
  • SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $138.40
  • SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF (in another account): $275.58
  • SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF: $1344.35
  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $42.85

 

Big Jim says there is nothing wrong with having first-world problems if you live in the first world.

Painting is a section of a nativity scene by Fra Angelico (1395 – 1455); image from Wikimedia, image assumed to be under public domain.

2023-05 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for May, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $288.94. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $2880.63.

The income for May 2022 was $151.63, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of May was $2549.21.

I do not have a whole lot to say on corrupt-o-currency this month.

One of the causes of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was duration mismatch. They bought long-dated bonds while interest rates were low, and as rates increased, they had solvency issues. I would argue that knowing how to deal with interest rates is something banks are supposed to know how to do. Just a guess: if rates are low, borrow bonds with short durations. My bank is a bank in Texas that has about $50-$55 billion in assets. They are in the asset size range ($50B to $250B) that was covered by tighter regulations when Dodd-Frank was passed, but then became exempt after the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2017. Until spring of last year, they were paying my about $2-3 dollars in interest in my savings every month. Now for the past few months it has been $85-100 a month. So if my bank could handle rising interest rates, perhaps the people running SVB were just not good at their jobs.

In addition to duration mismatch, Michel de Cryptadamus says SVB went under due to dodgy loans to the usual SV trash: crypto bros, entitled VCs, founders of companies that do nothing useful (article here, archive here).

I do not have a whole lot to say about corrupt-o-currency this month. You can keep up with what is going on by going to Molly White’s newsletter (Mastodon link here) and reading the articles by Amy Castor and David Gerard (link to David’s Mastodon here; I do not think Amy Castor is on Mastodon).

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each May from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-05 $2880.63 $288.94 $861.81 $1043.10
2022-05 $2549.21 $151.63 $750.34 $916.72
2021-05 $2500.04 $160.93 $742.94 $882.58
2020-05 $2450.65 $179.08 $747.49 $909.85
2019-05 $2006.71 $150.95 $592.51 $638.08
2018-05 $1321.55 $44.66 $398.51 $542.66
2017-05 $2346.62 $531.68 $553.90 $530.30
2016-05 $2059.52 $436.85 $479.79 $477.37
2015-05 $1803.11 $361.99 $411.92 $402.51
2014-05 $1411.19 $280.01 $304.77 $306.30
2013-05 $1141.24 $242.65 $260.91 $288.11
2012-05 $1268.97 $258.15 $257.13 $270.51
2011-05 $1114.84 $266.55 $233.03 $194.61

Here are the securities and the income amounts for May, 2023:

  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $48.41
  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $187.52
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $16.10
  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $36.91

 

Big Jim was cataloging artwork in Org Mode, and does not have anything to say at the moment.

Image of “Hercules at the Crossroads” by Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787); image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under public domain.

2023-04 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for April, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $206.73. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $2591.69.

The income for April, 2022 was $265.84, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of April was $2397.58.

Today the big story is another bank failure: JPMorgan Chase took over the assets of California-based First Republic bank. This is the fourth mid-sized bank that has failed in a month.

Of the four that failed this year, three of them (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and now First Republic Bank) had assets of between $50 billion and $250 billion. The Dodd-Frank Act passed in 2010, and stipulated that banks with more than $50B in assets had to undergo more frequent stress tests and keep higher levels of cash reserves on hand. The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (aka EGRRCPA) passed in 2017 raised that level to $250B. Executives from at least one of these failed banks lobbied for the regulations to be lifted, and they got what they wanted. We do not know what would have happened if Dodd-Frank had not been altered, but I have no problem pointing out that three of these four failed banks might not have failed if the regulations were left unaltered.

A lot of people love to say that regulation can slow businesses down. But when de-regulated firms fail, those same people get quiet. I think slow is better than bankrupt, despite what the self-proclaimed “party of business” says.

There is an article on Daily Kos encouraging people to pull their money out of the big banks. I used to have accounts with Chase. There were advantages to having an account with a bank that had offices everywhere, but Chase seemed to keep making headlines for wrong-doing, sort of like Wells Fargo a few years ago. I moved my accounts to a bank based in Texas. So far it has worked out okay for me.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each April from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-04 $2591.69 $206.73 $831.05 $1031.66
2022-04 $2397.58 $265.84 $774.77 $917.50
2021-04 $2339.11 $259.95 $750.24 $884.09
2020-04 $2271.57 $200.13 $753.19 $907.51
2019-04 $1855.76 $483.26 $588.35 $629.22
2018-04 $1276.89 $50.88 $405.77 $583.24
2017-04 $1814.94 $324.66 $532.02 $522.40
2016-04 $1622.67 $270.38 $461.86 $471.14
2015-04 $1441.12 $261.30 $409.21 $395.68
2014-04 $1130.58 $196.43 $323.64 $303.18
2013-04 $898.59 $179.23 $262.82 $289.40
2012-04 $1010.82 $218.56 $274.05 $271.21
2011-04 $848.29 $203.10 $216.30 $179.46

Here are the securities and the income amounts for April, 2023:

  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $190.24
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $16.49

 

Big Jim says it is better to try to get rich slowly than to try to do it quickly.

Painting by Vicente López Portaña (1772 – 1850); image from Wikimedia, image assumed to be under public domain.

2023-03 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for March, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $2089.76. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $2384.96.

The income for March, 2022 was $1833.54, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of March was $2131.74.

A lot happened in March. There were the first big bank failures since the Great Recession. Three banks all beginning with the letter “S” went under in about a week: Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and Signature Bank.

Two of them (Silvegate and Signature) were involved in corrupt-o-currency. SVB was the bank for the tech bros, who pushed corrupt-o-currency. SVB was the biggest and caused the most concern. I do not think we can say that corrupt-o-currency by itself caused the failures, but it did not help. If Silvergate and Signature had not gotten involved in corrupt-o-currency, they might still be around. They might have made other mistakes. But Silvergate seems to have gone all-in: They became the on-off ramp between corrupt-o-currency and real money, they started the process to make a stable coin, and they marketed themselves as a bank for companies involved with corrupt-o-currency nonsense (people need to stop calling corrupt-o-currency an “industry”). The failure of Silvergate caused a lot of people to worry about SVB.

SVB did not market itself to corrupt-o-currency clowns as much as the other two, but it was the go-to bank for tech bros. They lobbied to get Dodd-Frank regulations loosened, which happened in 2018. It raised the level of bank assets that would trigger higher liquidity reserve levels and more frequent stress tests. SVB was just under the new amount. (Silvergate’s assets were under the previous, lower amount; both SVB and Signature were above the old amount and under the new amount, so became exempt from Dodd-Frank.) Also they lost a lot of money in the Treasury market: they bought long-dated government bonds while interest rates were rising. Rising interest rates sounds like the sort of thing that a bank should know how deal deal. Especially if they had a Chief Risk Officer while rates were going up.

Signature Bank also marketed itself to companies in the corrupt-o-currency nonsense.

SVB got the most attention. Partially because a lot of tech bros who usually want the gubb-ment out of their lives were screaming for bailout. And telling the world that they were really, really important to the economy. This caused a lot of backlash, both for the hypocrisy of “BigGov is good only when I need something, and bad when you need something”, and for the fact that this group has an affect on our economy, culture and politics despite not doing anything for anyone else’s benefit.

Accelerator YCombinator wrote a letter asking for bailout and overstating Silicon Valley’s importance to the economy (discussion on Hacker News). Just as this Slate article (archive here, HN discussion here) states: What has Silicon Valley done for the world? What do they have to show for all the money they have gotten? The past decade has been trying to get around labor regulations (Uber, Taskrabbit, Airbnb) and blockchain/web3/corrupt-o-currency. I was listening to an episode of the Risky Business podcast from 2015 or 2016, and there was a story about a US general worried that the US was going to fall behind technologically. This general pointed out that Silicon Valley firms spent about four or five times as much on R&D as the biggest defense contractors. The hosts joked that they could not think of anything that had come out of Google that was interesting for years.

We have had low interest rates for years. Instead of doing something about climate change or water desalinization, it has been garbage. Here is a comment on another article in HN that got flagged, but one that I agree with:

“Because by god it’s fucking funny for literally anyone that isn’t a US tech bro. We’ve all watched a massive bubble form, with shitty-ass Bluetooth connected dog feeders that are meant to change the world get 150 millions in series A, watch as tech bros whose only qualifications are being born in the right place and an online class on React make half a million a year and gloat about how easy it is to make money in tech, trying to teach lessons to the entire world about running their 50 queries/sec on a K8S cluster on AWS and overall, very much enjoying the financial illiteracy of pretty much their entire sector.

So, yes, it’s pretty fucking funny when it blows up in their face. But I’m not too worried about the actually talented people. Sure, they might spend a bit of time in uncertain conditions (actually, no, with those salaries, you’re straight up a danger to yourself if you don’t already have a multiple year long cushion), but overall, they’ll bounce back.

EDIT: Additionally, these overpaid employees will still get their money, and a good bunch of them will go back to praising the startup life. Founders will have to live through the horrors of becoming employees again after they’ve blown their VC’s money. VCs will continue to blow billions on dog collars and online SaaS offerings for renting dogs, and shoot in eachother’s legs as much as they can instead of being useful contributions to society. Don’t ask Peter Thiel why all of his companies pulled out of SVB and why he massively contributed to the run.

There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that had a few points I actually agree with (archive here, HN discussion here). The first is about Dodd-Frank: These standards brought greater stability to the sector, but also higher expenses and lower profits. Bank leaders weren’t pleased and soon began lobbying to mitigate the legislation’s impact on their operations. SVB’s CEO Greg Becker was an early objector who argued that subjecting his midsize bank to the full range of Dodd-Frank requirements “would stifle our ability to provide credit to our clients.” It turns out they were right this time about regulations getting in their way. They were able to tank themselves.

Here is a later paragraph: Not all regulations are “burdensome.” Some are essential to prevent bad things from happening, as in this case. Congress and the Fed should rethink their decision to exempt key parts of the financial system from the discipline of oversight. Whenever executives complain that regulations are burdensome and would slow the growth of the economy, I always think of something Ken Lewis said around the time of the Great Recession: in one year (I think it was 2007), the investment banking division of Bank of America lost as much in that year as it made in three prior years combined. Maybe regulation will slow down the growth, but then maybe that slow growth won’t get wiped out in far less time than it took to happen.

Here are a few thought from the Status Kuo newsletter on Substack (article here, archive here):

But this is capitalism. Why can’t we just let rich VCs and their portfolio companies eat their losses?

We could, of course. But the trade-off is that we might create the very kind of uncertainty that is harmful to stable growth and financial sector health. Depositors need assurances so they don’t pull their funds out of other banks in a panic.

First off, I honestly do not understand why the VC firms themselves could not have given their portfolio companies money to tide them over. Handing out money is what VC firms do. WRT uncertainty: What is wrong with uncertainty? If anyone expresses resentment towards rich people or the self-proclaimed captains of industry, they say they deserve their wealth because they took risks. They acted despite uncertainty. But when they want something, or the future starts looking dicey, suddenly “uncertainty” is a reason for not acting. Or giving their portfolio companies more money.

From the same article: Did deregulation contribute to the collapse?

This is something that will be fought over by the parties over the coming weeks. There are indications that the kinds of regulations, including so-called “stress testing” for smaller regional banks, that would have surfaced problems and kept this from happening were eliminated by the Trump administration in 2018. But there were also Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin, who pushed for that deregulation, so the political narrative isn’t so cut-and-dried here.

Actually, it is pretty cut and dried here. There are more Republicans against regulation than Democrats. Look up the votes for the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Yes, some Democrats in the House voted for it, but almost no Republicans voted against it. And the difference in the Senate vote was even starker. Yes, some Democrats voted for de-regulation, but not all. And back in 2008 when the economy went off the rails, the two parties reacted differently. A lot of Democrats who were pro-regulation rethought their stance. We saw people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders gain prominence. On the Republican side, the reactions were conspiracy theories and saying we need to keep give MORE money to the wealthy.

People need to stop saying the two parties as the same. Maybe Democrats are not perfect, but the Republicans are just insane. A lot of people will not criticize Republicans until Democrats are perfect. Expecting people who want to make things better to always be perfect has just made things worse. People need to get mad at what the Republicans are doing. Stop blaming Democrats for what Republicans do. Stop waiting for Democrats to be perfect while Republicans get worse. Both sides are not the same.

There are two quotes that are appropriate here:

  • Every five to ten years, people forget there is a recession every five to ten years.
  • The point of deregulation is to remind us why we have regulation.

 

There will probably be more corrupt-o-currency nonsense in next month’s report.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each March from the beginning of my records through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-03 $2384.96 $2089.76 $794.99 $1036.58
2022-03 $2131.74 $1833.54 $710.58 $917.01
2021-03 $2079.16 $1807.93 $693.05 $879.10
2020-03 $2071.44 $1863.26 $690.48 $931.10
2019-03 $1372.50 $1143.33 $457.50 $593.19
2018-03 $1226.01 $1099.99 $408.67 $606.06
2017-03 $1490.28 $805.35 $496.76 $517.88
2016-03 $1352.29 $732.13 $450.76 $470.38
2015-03 $1179.82 $612.48 $393.27 $390.27
2014-03 $934.15 $437.87 $311.38 $301.75
2013-03 $719.36 $360.85 $239.79 $292.68
2012-03 $792.26 $294.68 $264.09 $269.92
2011-03 $645.19 $229.43 $200.06 $163.15

Here are the securities and the income amounts for March, 2023:

  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $51.51
  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $170.51
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $13.52
  • SPDR S&P Dividend ETF: $794.47
  • SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $94.99
  • SPDR Dow Jones REIT ETF: $189.13
  • SPDR S&P Global Dividend ETF: $456.61
  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $50.86
  • Vanguard Utilities ETF: $268.16

 

Big Jim would rather be Captain Obvious than a major asshole or generally clueless.

Painting by Giovanni Antonio Guardi (1699 -1760); image from Wikimedia, image assumed to be under public domain.

Payment Totals

When I make a payment on my credit card, I tend to pay in incrementing amounts that I reset every month.

I think I started this a while back when some accounts were new, and I wanted to make a smaller payment so I did not lose too much money if something was wrong. I still do not like making big payments, and it gives me a quick way to check how much money I have spent in a month. Plus if I make small payments then I am logging into my credit card company’s website every few days which gives me a chance to double check that there no charges I did not authorize.

Payment Total
101 101
102 203
103 306
104 410
105 515
106 621
107 728
108 836
109 945
110 1055
111 1166
112 1278
113 1391
114 1505
115 1620
116 1736
117 1853
118 1971
119 2090
120 2210
121 2331
122 2453
123 2576
124 2700
125 2825
126 2951
127 3078
128 3206
129 3335
130 3465

Big Jim likes process because it makes life easier to manage because it gives him less to keep track of.

Image by 19th-century French painter Cornelius Ary Renan (1857–1900); image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under public domain.

2023-02 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for February, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $196.67. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $295.20.

The income for February, 2022 was $224.92, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of February was $298.20.

I have not talked too much about corrupt-o-currency in the past few dividend income reports. I was going to opine some more, but a lot happened. A few banks that were into corrupt-o-currency went under. One of them (Silicon Valley Bank) lobbied for regulations to be loosened. And when it was looking shaky, all the glibertarian tech bros wanted the government they always regard as incompetent and a nuisance to bail them out.

Per the quote that is misattributed to Lenin, there are decades when weeks happen, and weeks when decades happen. Just like Michel on Gilmore Girls, the glibertarians and corrupt-o-currency bros have been so stupid lately I cannot keep up.

I might have more to say next month.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each February from 2012 through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-02 $295.20 $196.67 $1146.81 $1015.23
2022-02 $298.20 $224.92 $1235.58 $914.87
2021-02 $271.23 $182.83 $1253.94 $883.71
2020-02 $208.18 $196.17 $1259.50 $871.11
2019-02 $229.17 $138.45 $847.72 $589.58
2018-02 $126.02 $66.43 $654.60 $581.51
2017-02 $684.93 $466.05 $570.90 $511.78
2016-02 $620.16 $383.08 $524.89 $460.41
2015-02 $567.34 $353.85 $492.40 $375.72
2014-02 $496.28 $336.61 $363.62 $295.33
2013-02 $358.51 $248.39 $348.20 $287.16
2012-02 $497.58 $308.90 $337.51 $264.48

Here are the securities and the income amounts for February, 2023:

  • Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF: $182.27
  • Vanguard Total International Bond ETF: $14.40

 

Big Jim says Christian theocracies would not be any more fun than Muslim theocracies.

Painting of the garden of Gethsemane by Sebastiano Conca (1680 – 1764); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.

I Moved To A New Mastodon Server

I got a new account on another Mastodon server here.

I am now on Universeodon. Originally I was on Mashead.social. For some reason they went offline in early March. There are a few posts about it on the Mastodon subreddit. Supposedly it is still in progress, but I have decided to stop waiting.

I saved the email address of the admin of the new server if I ever need to email them. I might donate some money to them. I will add them to the list of organizations I could donate to.

I have decided to save for posterity a few of my thoughts here since they are now lost to the ether. I was able to track down a few actual URLs, some others are from memory.

Robert Reich had a mast [Note 1] about how Norfolk Southern had spent $4.7 billion in dividends and buybacks in 2022, reduced its workforce over 20 years by 33%, and then when there is a derailment they act like there was no way to prevent it. I posted: @rbreich On one hand I agree, but I hate it when people equate divs and buybacks as the same thing. A lot of us are counting on dividend growing stocks to fund our retirement. Buybacks are just corporations going into debt to play games with money (usually to fund options for execs). Let’s go back to making those illegal.

David Gerard masted a link to an article by fellow no-cointer Amy Castor titled “Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Why can’t Bitcoin?” Short answer: Because the bitcon developers and miners do not want to. I posted: @davidgerard One of the definitions of “fiat” is “an arbitrary decree or pronouncement”. There are so many things about BTC that are arbitrary: block size, new block every 10 minutes, 21 million BTC total. And it was all made up by someone whose identity has never been verified. And now POW will not change until the miners allow it to. BTC people think BTC is objective, like calculus, but it is more fiat (in general sense) than “fiat currency” is.

Corrupt-o-currency is fiat, but they talk about it like it is some eternal truth, like calculus.

Another post was a link to a Vanity Fair article titled Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing for Apocalypse. It was about people moving out to the western states (Wyoming, Montana) because they think society is corrupt and about to collapse. Most of them were conservatives, or people who voted GOP or Glibertarian, so there was a lot more “Far Right” than “Far Left”; I guess Vanity Fair has to get on the “both sides” bandwagon. Here is one quote from the article: She is a proud conservative who views the corporate elite as enemies of America, and believes that we’re on the cusp of a populist uprising against the brand of transnational capitalism championed by Republicans for most of the last half-century. Typical. This is how conservatives think: Plan A did not work, so let’s double down on Plan A. Conservatives got us to this point; it wasn’t the hippies that wanted to close the factories and send jobs overseas. Another quote from her: [Her grandfather] was a devout Christian and actually cared about this country and wanted to build this country up. No lady, your “devout Christian” grandfather did not want to build this country up. He just wanted to kick people around. That is what devout Christians do.

Another thing: A lot of the people in that article think the issue is “globalism”, yet they support people like Trump and Bannon. Trump loves Putin, and he’s buds with MBS, Bolsonaro, Orban, Duterte, Bannon name-drops Modi. Isn’t that a form of globalism? Globalism to improve trade and make us more connected: bad according to these people. Globalism to kick around people they do not like: good according to them. And how “America-First” was Trump really? Trump talked tough against China, yet China gave Ivanka trademarks, and then Dolt45 said he would lift sanctions on Chinese telecom firm ZTE for working with Iran and North Korea. The Biden Administration has been tightening export restrictions on semiconductor manfuacturing equipment to China (see articles here, here and here). Yet a lot of people think Trump was tough on China and that the Biden family is buds with the CCP. Globalism to line the pockets of the Trump family: good, according to these people. Globalism to work with allies to isolate Russia or China: bad according to them.

I had a couple of others. One was where I posted that the problem with our current economic environment is not just that everything has to keep growing, but the growth rate itself also has to grow. Second derivative capitalism will be the end of us all.

Another post was that I think a big cause of problems in our society is not just the people who vote GOP because they are nasty racist and/or religious wackjobs. One big problem is the people who vote GOP “for the tax cuts”. They never seem to get in their heads that tax cuts are a part of the package. The grifting, the performance art, the incompetence, the nepotism, the racism, the religious nuttery: it is comes with it as well. On top of that, tax cuts never have the promised results. At the federal level, spending never goes down (perhaps they should try actually cutting spending before cutting taxes), economic growth is the same, and taxes never get simpler. At the state level, all you get are bad roads and four day school weeks.

Just like the last time, and the time before that.

Note 1: Yes, I know they are called “toots”, but that just sounds stupid. So why should you mast? Because it’s a blast.

Image of the flight from Egypt by Giotto di Bondone; image from Wikimedia, assumed allowed under public domain.

2023-01 Dividend Income Report

Here is the dividend income report for January, 2023.

The monthly dividend income came out to $98.53. The yearly income total for 2023 through the end of the month was $98.53. This is the only month the math is this easy.

The income for January, 2022 was $73.28, and the yearly income for 2022 through the end of January was $73.28.

First month and I am already beating the prior year by 20%.

This is the seventh month that my twelve-month moving average was above $1,000.

The only security to pay out in January was the Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF. There were two payments, since the payment for December always gets paid in January. That fund usually has four months in a year where the fund has a record date in one month, but pays in the next month.

I have been studying for a certification for work. It is looking more likely I will be leaving my employer soon. Right now I do not have another position lined up, so I will have to live on savings. I could probably get by for three years on my savings. My Roth 401k would go into my Roth IRA, and my dividend income will go up by a lot.

I logged onto the Social Security website, and if I understood the graph correctly, even if I had no income between now and when I turn 62, I could get $1600/month. I do plan on working more, so that is the worst-case scenario. All I have to do is survive until then.

Here is a table with the year-to-date amounts, the monthly amounts, and the three- and twelve-month moving averages for each January from 2012 through 2023:

Month YTD Amount 3MMA 12MMA
2023-01 $98.53 $98.53 $1173.95 $1017.58
2022-01 $73.28 $73.28 $1215.96 $911.36
2021-01 $88.40 $88.40 $1258.54 $884.83
2020-01 $12.01 $12.01 $1236.27 $866.30
2019-01 $90.72 $90.72 $818.52 $583.57
2018-01 $59.59 $59.59 $819.32 $614.81
2017-01 $218.88 $218.88 $584.54 $504.86
2016-01 $237.08 $237.08 $550.81 $457.97
2015-01 $213.49 $213.49 $471.54 $374.28
2014-01 $159.67 $159.67 $335.67 $287.98
2013-01 $110.12 $110.12 $348.07 $292.20
2012-01 $188.68 $188.68 $316.66 $256.77

Here are the securities and the income amounts for January, 2023:

  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $47.29
  • Global X S&P 500 Covered Call ETF: $51.24

Big Jim has a principle of never touching the principal.

Painting of Godfrey of Bouillon at Mount Sinai by Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz (1815-1894); image from Wikimedia; image assumed to be under public domain.