股息又回来了。投资者感到高兴是正确的吗？

经济学人：

Meta celebrated its 20th anniversary this week as all good and mature businesses should: by paying shareholders a dividend. In lieu of a birthday bash, the Silicon Valley stalwart marked its coming of age with a stock buy-back and, for the first time, by offering a dividend. Investors will receive 50 cents per share. Markets partied, with Meta’s share price rising by 20%, adding more than $200bn to the company’s market capitalisation on the day of the announcement.

Meta 本周庆祝了成立 20 周年，就像所有优秀和成熟的企业都应该做的那样：通过向股东支付股息。这家硅谷的中坚力量没有举行生日庆祝活动，而是通过股票回购和首次派发股息来标志着自己的成熟。投资者每股将获得 50 美分。消息公布当天，市场一片欢腾，Meta 股价上涨 20%，公司市值增加超过 2000 亿美元。

The dividend, a 17th-century innovation, was a mainstay of markets for much of the 20th century. Stockpickers used the cash they earned from dividends to price shares. The Bloomberg terminal of its time, Moody’s Analyses of Investments, evaluated the giants of American rail on dividends per mile of railroad laid. But the years have not been kind to the once-dominant dividend. Since the early 1990s, regular cash payments to shareholders have been in retreat, losing out to stock buy-backs, in which management uses earnings to repurchase their stock, boosting the share price.

股息是 17 世纪的一项创新，在 20 世纪的大部分时间里都是市场的支柱。选股者利用从股息中赚取的现金来定价股票。当时的彭博终端——穆迪投资分析公司，根据每英里铁路铺设的股息对美国铁路巨头进行了评估。但这些年对曾经占主导地位的股息并不友善。自 20 世纪 90 年代初以来，向股东定期支付的现金一直在减少，输给了股票回购，即管理层利用收益回购股票，从而推高了股价。

Managers love buy-backs because they cut the number of shares on the market, lifting earnings per share—and thus often executive compensation, too. A higher stock price is all the more enticing if management is compensated with the option to buy company shares. In the past, investors have also preferred buy-backs. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rates than dividend income in some countries, and investors like owning an appreciating asset because they can choose when to sell and pay the taxman.

经理人喜欢回购，因为他们减少了市场上的股票数量，提高了每股收益，因此通常也会提高高管薪酬。如果管理层能够通过购买公司股票的选择权获得补偿，那么更高的股价就更有吸引力。过去，投资者也更喜欢回购。在一些国家，资本利得的税率低于股息收入，投资者喜欢拥有升值的资产，因为他们可以选择何时出售并缴纳税款。

Meta’s decision to hand earnings to its minority owners received a raucous reception, however. It is just the latest sign that markets are coming to appreciate dividends. Those from s&p 500 firms rose to $588bn last year, up 22% against three years ago. Investors have put $316bn in dividend-focused exchange-traded funds globally, almost doubling their size over the same period. An analyst at Bank of America speculates that 2024 could be “a banner year for dividends”.

然而，Meta 将收益交给少数股东的决定却遭到了热烈的欢迎。这只是市场开始重视股息的最新迹象。去年，标准普尔 500 强公司的投资额增至 5,880 亿美元，比三年前增长 22%。全球投资者已向以股息为重点的交易所交易基金投入了 3160 亿美元，同期规模几乎翻了一番。美国银行的一位分析师推测，2024 年可能是“股息红利的一年”。

Why the shift? Daniel Peris of Federated Hermes, an investment house, and author of a new book, “The Ownership Dividend”, puts the decline of cash payments down to decades of falling interest rates and Reagan-era changes to buy-back rules. As the risk-free rate fell, returns on bonds and savings diminished, and so did the advantages of holding cash. Cheap money enabled investors to plough capital into non-dividend-paying growth stocks.

为什么要转变？投资公司 Federated Hermes 的丹尼尔·佩里斯 (Daniel Peris) 是新书《所有权红利》(The Ownership Dividend) 的作者，他将现金支付的减少归因于几十年来利率的下降和里根时代对回购规则的改变。随着无风险利率下降，债券和储蓄的回报减少，持有现金的优势也随之减少。廉价资金使投资者能够将资金投入不派息的成长型股票。

In that time, writes Mr Peris, highfalutin financiers came to see the dividend as the preserve of “widows and orphans”. Only staid companies, like banks and utilities, tended to bother with them. Yet today’s economic environment looks different. Interest rates have risen. Startups without a path to profitability are failing to win over investors. And the Biden administration has levied a tax on buy-backs. It is currently meagre but officials hope it will rise.

佩里斯写道，当时，高调的金融家们开始将股息视为“寡妇和孤儿”的专利。只有银行和公用事业等稳重的公司才会对它们费心。然而今天的经济环境看起来有所不同。利率上升了。没有盈利途径的初创公司无法赢得投资者的青睐。拜登政府还对回购征税。目前这一数字微薄，但官员们希望这一数字能够上升。

Perhaps cash is once again king. Higher interest rates mean that investors can put income to work. Many are enjoying respectable, risk-free returns in money-market funds. Higher risk-free rates also lower the value of future earnings in today’s dollars, meaning some investors will prefer cash in hand today to higher stock prices tomorrow.

也许现金再次为王。较高的利率意味着投资者可以将收入用于工作。许多人在货币市场基金中享受着可观的、无风险的回报。更高的无风险利率也会降低以今天的美元计算的未来收益的价值，这意味着一些投资者会更喜欢今天手头的现金，而不是明天更高的股价。

A similar calculation holds true for management, whose options for deploying cash have become more limited. Higher rates demand higher expected returns from long-term investments and discourage taking on debt to fund share repurchases. The Biden administration’s distrust of corporate takeovers means that acquisitions are less viable. Many firms are therefore considering how best to return dollars to their shareholders.

类似的计算也适用于管理层，他们部署现金的选择变得更加有限。较高的利率要求长期投资获得更高的预期回报，并阻止为股票回购融资而举债。拜登政府对企业收购的不信任意味着收购的可行性较低。因此，许多公司正在考虑如何最好地将资金返还给股东。

Investors have reason to be careful, however. As economists argue, earning a dividend is like taking cash out of an atm—it does not make you richer. If a company were to reinvest its earnings rather than pay out a dividend, it ought to make more money in future and thus deliver a higher share price. As a consequence, investors should be equally happy with either option.

然而，投资者有理由保持谨慎。正如经济学家所说，赚取股息就像从自动提款机中取出现金一样，它不会让你变得更富有。如果一家公司将其收益进行再投资而不是支付股息，那么它应该在未来赚更多的钱，从而带来更高的股价。因此，投资者应该对这两种选择都同样满意。

A firm that issues a dividend is signalling that it has confidence in its future cash flows, since shareholders often assume dividends will be permanent and managers are loath to cut them. Yet such a move also suggests that bosses have nowhere better to invest company cash, which bodes poorly for a firm’s growth. Although high-yielding dividend stocks offer a reliable income stream, they are unlikely to reward owners with a capital gain worth celebrating.

一家发放股息的公司表明它对其未来现金流充满信心，因为股东通常认为股息将是永久性的，而管理者则不愿削减股息。然而，此举也表明老板们没有更好的地方来投资公司现金，这对公司的增长来说不是一个好兆头。尽管高收益股息股票提供了可靠的收入来源，但它们不太可能为所有者带来值得庆祝的资本收益。