Culp pulled the trigger - GE's quarterly dividend has been cut to 1 cent per share. At the same time, the Power divisions will be split into two divisions, with an additional $22 billion writedown of goodwill associated with it. Some breaking perspectives:

www.reuters.com/.../general-electric-cuts-dividend-splits-loss-making-power-unit-idUSKCN1N41BJ

www.investors.com/.../ge-dividend-cut-ge-earnings-ge-power/

www.zerohedge.com/.../ge-cuts-dividend-1-cent-amid-huge-earnings-miss-22-billion-writedown

In a nutshell, earnings took a big hit, with very few bright spots (GE Aviation being one).

Typo alert! The second sentence in the Analyst's Notes section should read as follows:

Our alternate estimate is up by 0.4% from the $62,152 preliminary figure that we had previously reported for July 2018, which we would revise upward this month to be $62,184.

An increase to $625,184 would have truly been remarkable!

Very good points - thank you for your comments! We should also recognize that China's retaliatory tariffs are having a similar effect on Chinese consumers where U.S. goods are involved. Where the interests of regular people are involved, tariffs are not a positive development, no matter why they're applied.

Clearly, we hadn't yet have enough coffee when we wrote:

"where we can use a the linear trend established in the months before any tariffs were first imposed as a counterfactual for what the value of trade would be in the absence of their budding trade war with each other."

If we had more caffeine, and a do-over, we would make that:

"where we can use the trend established in the months before any tariffs were first imposed as a counterfactual to tell us what the value of trade would be in the absence of their budding trade war with each other."

Small differences, but much clearer!...

Our thanks to TalkMarkets' editors for updating the article with the corrected version of the animated chart so quickly! [For those wondering what we're talking about, we had erroneously posted a version of the chart that only showed data through December 2017.]

Thanks for your comments. We're expressing our own takeaway from Flannery's earlier comments. I would agree that Flannery did not intend to set that expectation, but since investors reacted the way they did to those remarks, it would appear that we weren't alone in having that impression.

From a practical management standpoint, if a dividend cut was being considered for the immediate future, GE could have followed through with announcing it in June, where we think that the impact to its stock price would have been minimal because the expectation of a dividend cut among investors had already effectively lowered the stock price. In other words, the expectation was built in. And, to a certain extent, it still is.

If GE does ultimately follow through and announce another dividend cut later, we would describe the June meeting as a missed opportunity for GE's leadership to get the negative impact behind them earlier. That said, I hope the company's business outlook stabilizes and it doesn't have to come to that - we would much rather analyze the company's successful turnaround!

Correction - need to fix the date in the second paragraph, where the affected sentence should read as follows:

Or to put it more simply, there is currently very little chance that the National Bureau of Economic Research will someday declare that a national recession began in the U.S. between now and 22 September 2018 as based upon Jonathan Wright's recession forecasting method.

Correction: That should be $137 billion in the last paragraph (not "$137 million").

Quick follow up: We got our wires crossed in reading the FedWatch model - with a now 87% probability that the Fed will not hike interest rates in 2017-Q3, it is actually largely in agreement with what the S&P 500 and dividend futures are telling us!

Typo alert! The third paragraph should read:

"With that introduction now out of the way, we can now update the U.S.' national dividend through the end of 2016."