taxes
Chanos: “I have a problem with private capital asking for lower tax rates on certain forms of income that I believe are income, not returns on capital, than say teachers, soldiers, fireman and policeman”
By Bess Levin
“I hope people wake up — America has to suck it up.” Mr. Perella said at a panel discussion on Wednesday hosted by Thomson Reuters. “The country is 40 percent overweight, Bloomberg tries to close down schools that turn out only 25 percent of the ‘products’ that work and he can’t, the budget is completely out of whack. None of this is going to get fixed if people aren’t willing to sacrifice.”
Obviously a whole lot but in this case the answer we were looking for was failure to pay taxes like the rest of us law abiding citizens. Read more »
Are you one of the UBS clients who maybe used the firm to get around paying your some or all of your taxes? Have you been considering whether or not to come forward and admit it, not because of the shame (there’s no shame in this! Except that you’re lumped in the same category as Tim Geithner, which is a little hard to swallow), but because of the possible jail time? It turns out these sentences aren’t so bad! They probably won’t send you downtown and, if you get lucky like this guy, you’ll get to play the slots at your leisure.
John McCarthy, a businessman from the wealthy seaside enclave of Malibu, also was placed on three years supervised probation on Monday and fined $25,000 for his guilty plea to a single felony count of failing to report a foreign bank account from 2003 through 2008.In addition to the fine, McCarthy was ordered to make restitution of more than $485,000 he owed to the government, which he already has paid, and to perform 300 hours of community service, which he can do while under home detention.
He had faced a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines.But Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank said she weighed in McCarthy’s favor his cooperation with authorities, the fact that he had no prior criminal record and had otherwise “led a responsible, law-abiding life.”
Hug-lover Timmy G., testifying today (does the guy’s job entails something else than testifying at hearings?) before the Senate Budget Committee, proposed to enact a “carried interest” tax for hedge funds and PE managers – a move that could double some funds’ taxes.
For those of you whose firms don’t perform these procedures on-site and on the house: sex changes are now deductible (though boob jobs are not).
Ace “I give away Viagra” Greenberg came out of his silence today to support Lloyd & Co. (well, mostly Lloyd) who have been unfairly attacked for no valid reasons. People just don’t understand that the banking world needs superstars that need to be very well compensated and that the industry (GS) has been doing a very fine job, thank you very much, so stop harassing them.
“You don’t win the World Series and not have A-Rod” he said in a CNBC interview.
Ace also argued that banks were forced to take the TARP money and that Obama’s proposed bank tax is just “unfair, unwarranted and unprecedented.”
On the potential Glass-Steagall resurrection, Ace had just one thing to say: “The egg has been scrambled and I don’t think they can put it back in the shell.”
The Times editorial boardAnd by “‘em,” The New York Times means you. In a populist screed atop Sunday’s editorial page, the august guardians of opinion at the Gray Lady implore the President to follow the lead of his British and French counterparts and tax the hell out of your bonus, should you be so lucky to receive one.
…the British found a way to realign the fat cats’ boundless greed with the public interest: slapping a hefty windfall tax on their bonuses.
That’s right, fat cats. “The best hope for curbing bankers’ unbridled appetite for risk” is a 50% one-time-only tax on bonuses that, in all likelihood, will be comically easy to evade.
The French will simply not be outdone on matters of making Europe the most inhospitable place on earth to be a banker. Fresh from declaring victory over the wicked Anglo-Saxons and their lasseiz-faire banking cabal, France now says it, too, will impose a huge one-time tax on banking bonuses, just like the British said they’d do last week.
French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said that they, too, would take half of what the banks pay their employees this Christmas, thank you. The move is no surprise, given the Wall Street Journal op-ed from a few weeks ago where British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and le Petit Napoleon, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, called a one-off tax on banking bonuses “a priority, due to the fact that bonuses for 2009 have arisen partly because of government support for the banking system.”
Believe it or not the United States and UBSSwitzerland are not anxious to release the details of their 20-Questions: Tax Evaders settlement just this minute (or Friday, when the settlement is due to be concluded). You would think the settlement some sort of public relations embarrassment for Switzerland by this metric.
The settlement is likely to include the handing over of some UBS client data to the U.S. but UBS will be spared paying a fine, U.S. government sources have said.
A second source also confirmed the details were unlikely to be made public on Friday.
There had been speculation the U.S. and Switzerland would wait until the end of September to finalize the settlement to wait until the end of a U.S. voluntary tax disclosure programme.
So, really, the voluntary disclosure program (don’t say amnesty) only applies if you weren’t totally screwed by UBS before you had a chance to dial IRS customer service and fess up. (Or hit the “disclose foreign black account” button in TurboTax, if you work for the Treasury.)
UBS Tax Deal Details Unlikely On Friday [Reuters]
Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner is not making any new friends on trading desks. Gerstner bemoans Wall St.’s focus on short term trading rewards but goes one step further and offers a modest proposal to solve the problem. In his utopia, day traders would pay an 80% tax on gains, individuals holding investments for 6 months would pay a paltry 60%, and for those willing to hold on for 5 years, you’d pay nothing (presumably to match the gain).
Gerstner Says Short-Term Gains Should Be Taxed at 80% [Bloomberg]
- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
