The tiny hungarian oil company that taught me the essence of dividends

I started my job at Citigroup in London in April 2000... a month after the Nasdaq bubble burst and the beginning of the worst bear market in stocks since 1973-1974.
As a junior accountant, my first job was dividend control. I made sure hundreds of Citigroup stock traders received the correct dividend payments on the positions they held. And when investors didn't get what they were owed, I contacted Citigroup's clearing department and made the claim.
I remember one trader, Nick Rubeiro. He ran an emerging-market high-yield strategy from a desk in New York. He had the most obscure companies in his portfolio, and they always tripped up the computer systems.
"Mol Magyar pays tomorrow," he'd say about the Hungarian oil company. "I'm holding 100 million shares."
Then I'd find out he actually owned 125 million shares. That's a $7.5 million dividend.
I saw dozens of traders come and go on the trading floor that summer. The market was an absolute bloodbath. But every week, I'd get the same call from New York Nick chasing his missed distributions.
Nick's quarterly dividend payments became something of a symbol for me that summer... like a pillar of strength amidst all the carnage of the stock market. They pulled me off dividend control later that year and sent me to fixed income. But I never forgot about Nick's dividends...
Economists define a bear market as a 20% drop in the S&P index. The S&P is the index of the 500 largest companies in America. So it's the best way to determine how American stocks are behaving. In 2008, the S&P entered bear-market territory for the first time since 2002. As I write, the S&P is down 20% since October 2007... but it was down more than 25% two weeks ago. This is only the fifth time in last 100 years we've seen a 25% or greater decline in the S&P 500.