Global dividends suffer biggest quarterly fall since the Global Financial Crisis

All regions except the US suffered a drop in payouts, with the UK and Europe seeing the biggest falls at 54% and 45% respectively on an underlying basis. France and Spain were the only two individual larger stockmarkets to experience a sharper fall than the UK, as more than half of the UK's companies either cut or cancelled dividends altogether. The UK's dividends were most heavily impacted by the likes of HSBC, Shell, Lloyds and Glencore, although the study notes several large UK companies had been paying out an "excessively large portion of their profits as dividends for some time",...