Co-authored with Theresa Hamacher.
Risk matters as much as return in any mutual fund investment, but assessing the risk of a specific mutual fund can be a challenge. Even though mutual funds have become increasingly complex, their risk disclosure was designed for a simpler era, when funds used only traditional investment strategies.
Co-authored with Theresa Hamacher.
As April 15 approaches, high-income taxpayers may be thinking about the impact of recent legislation limiting their itemized deductions. Under one part of the legislative package from January, itemized deductions are reduced once income exceeds a certain threshold: $250,000 for single taxpayers and $300,000 for married couples.
In the recent tax legislation to avoid the fiscal cliff, Congress reinstated a limitation on itemized deductions for affluent taxpayers, known as Pease (after its original author, the late Rep. Donald Pease). Under Pease, itemized deductions are modestly reduced depending on how much a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income exceeds a specified threshold — $250,000 for an individual and $300,000 for a married couple.
Economists have long recognized the damaging effects of the high U.S. corporate tax—at 35%, the rate is the highest in the industrialized world. Over the past few years, politicians in both parties have come to understand that the corporate tax system itself is dysfunctional, causing resources to be misallocated and encouraging corporations to invest overseas.
The investment management world used to be simple. Mutual fund managers sold stock and bond investments to the general public subject to stringent regulation, while unregulated hedge fund managers served only the very wealthy with much riskier investment strategies.
In this economy, a college education is more important than ever: The unemployment rate for college graduates is 3.8 percent, compared to 7.8 percent for everyone else. Yet, the exploding costs of education are causing some students to graduate with heavy debt burdens.
In last year’s State of the Union, President Obama argued in favor of reforming how the U.S. taxes the foreign profits of U.S. corporations: “From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.” While an international minimum tax is a sound idea, it should be part of a broader effort to fix our dysfunctional system for taxing foreign profits.