63% of Russell 1000 paying dividends higher than Treasuries

At Thursday's close, more than 63% of dividend-paying stocks in the Russell 1000 index were yielding more than the 10-year Treasury. The 10-year, yielding about 1.76%, rallied from below 1.5% a few weeks ago as new issues coupled with declining demand pushed bond prices lower. The average dividend yield of the 713 stocks in the index was 2.64% at Thursday's close, up from 2.4% a year ago, but down from 2.92% at the start of the year.

For comparison, at the end of 2008 when the Treasury was yielding about 2.2%, 65.3% of dividend-paying companies were yielding higher than the 10-year. However, that period had seen equities fall 30% in the final third of the year, and thus the average dividend yield increased to 4.1%.