In 1966, Alan Greenspan wrote that printing money was “a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.”

According to Bill Bonner – one of the most widely-read independent financial writers of the last three decades – he spent the next four decades doing exactly that.

“He cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent by June 2003 and held it there,” Bonner writes, “and you watched housing prices detach from any sane relationship to income… The man who warned in 1966 about the hidden confiscation of wealth engineered the largest credit distortion in postwar history.”

The reflex became so reliable that markets named it after him – the Greenspan Put. Cut rates after every stumble, flood the system after every crash, catch every gambler who jumped off the ledge.

And investors drew the obvious conclusion, Bonner argues:

If the Fed would always step in, you didn’t need to ask hard questions about whether a company could actually sustain its returns through a real cycle.

Income discipline – the unglamorous, quarter-by-quarter work of finding companies that genuinely earn and return cash – fell out of fashion.

But the put is gone now.

Rates are higher and staying higher…

and investors who built portfolios assuming the floor would always be there are finding out, slowly, that it isn’t.

WorthNet Partner Adviser Chuck Carlson has spent more than 40 years as a dividend investor – through bull markets and bear markets… through the era of easy money… and now into a world where the backstop is gone.

Ask him about the Greenspan Put directly, and the honest answer is that it wasn’t part of his process.

“We never really considered the Greenspan Put in our analysis,” Carlson says. “We’ve always tried to find the stocks with the best total return potential – cap gains plus dividends plus dividend growth.”

In his view, the put mattered more to the market as a whole than to any individual stock.

In other words, it applied most to traders chasing short-term momentum – the kind of investor who assumes the Fed will always be there to catch them.

The longer your time horizon, Carlson suggests, the less the put ever really applied to you.

What does Carlson actually look for instead?

It starts with not putting too much stock into yield hunting:

“A mistake dividend and income investors make is to focus on dividend yield,” Carlson says. “But our work says the highest-yielding stocks are not necessarily the best stocks for growing the pie.”

Yield, he explains, is just one slice.

The goal is total return – growing the whole pie…

Carlson would rather own a stock with a lower yield and strong capital gains and dividend growth potential than chase the highest number on the yield line.

The other test he applies is the payout ratio – aka the percentage of a company’s profits being distributed as dividends.

“The payout ratio is probably the single most powerful predictor of safety and growth potential of a company’s dividend,” Carlson says.

That’s because a company paying out too much of its earnings has little room left to grow the dividend – or to survive a downturn without cutting it. A healthy payout ratio is a margin of safety, not just a number on a spreadsheet.

Finally, every dividend stock has to clear a quantitative bar before it earns a place in Carlson’s portfolios: his firm’s Quadrix^® stock-rating system, which evaluates more than 3,000 stocks across more than 90 variables – dividend payers and non-payers alike.

Note that none of Carlson’s factors – total return, payout ratio, the quantitative screening – depends on what happens in Washington. That’s the point.

WorthNet exists to do one thing: connect self-directed investors with experienced financial advisers who specialize in exactly the kind of planning we write about.

If Carlson’s approach to dividend investing resonates with you, click below and take our short questionnaire to see if you’re a match with a pre-vetted adviser in our small, invitation-only network, including Carlson and his team at Horizon Investment Services .

And because you’re an independent-minded financial newsletter reader, we believe you’ll want to know the honest, no-BS truth about how we work:

WorthNet has a financial relationship with the advisers in our select network – including Horizon Investment Services – and may receive compensation in connection with introductions made to the firm. Bill Bonner’s editorial views are his own and are independent of that relationship. Nothing here constitutes personalized investment, tax, legal, or financial planning advice. We’re just here to connect self-directed investors with the advisers we’ve carefully selected.

Charles B. Carlson, CFA®

CEO & Portfolio Manager of Horizon Investment Services

Investment Visionary, Seasoned Asset Allocator

Charles B. Carlson is a veteran investment adviser with over 25 years of experience in retirement planning, asset allocation, and portfolio management. He is CEO of Horizon Investment Services (CRD #110642), a proud member of the WorthNet partner adviser network.

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Last Revised: July 13, 2026