S&P 500 companies paid out more dividends in the first quarter

Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung breaks down the chart of the day.

Video Transcript

BRIAN CHEUNG: I want to shift gears and talk about public companies because the first earnings are in the books. And guys, they doled out a lot of dividend increases. Shout out, Howard Silverblatt at S&P Dow Jones Indices. This chart shows you the increase in billions among S&P 500 companies, $26.2 billion in the first quarter of this year. To keep seasonality, we're comparing these two first quarters of years past. That's what you're looking at. And Akiko, margins are really good for companies because, obviously, they're paying out a lot extra to shareholders.

But this raises questions about the operating environment, right? We hear about these companies saying they have to raise prices to preserve their profits, but they clearly have enough margins to dole out what is permanent distributions to these shareholders in the form of higher dividends.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, something tells me Senator Elizabeth Warren is going to have a lot to say about that. I mean, this is exactly the issue that we have heard from those who have said that companies, despite the challenges they've highlighted, with price increases, price pressures, they're not necessarily saving that aside. They're passing it down to investors.

BRIAN CHEUNG: Right, yeah, well, I mean, we'll have to see if this remains the case in Q2. We know that just a lot of this could be the corporate windfall of just the broad rebound that we have seen since the pandemic because a lot of companies also cut their dividends during the pandemic. So kind of want to look at a trend line over a longer period of time. But we will continue to see how that story develops as we get very close, by the way, to second quarter earnings season kicking off in just a few weeks.