S&P 500 companies shoveled $376 billion in cash to shareholders last year

Senior earnings analyst John Butters of market research firm FactSet wrote a blog post describing how S&P 500 companies paid out a total of $376 billion in dividends to their shareholders in the year between January 2013 and January 2014.

Butters included a chart showing that dividends per share (the blue line) have grown at an amazingly fast rate and are at a 20-year high:

Unsurprisingly, the two largest companies in the world, Exxon Mobil and Apple, are also the two biggest payers of dividends: