Our clients ask us a lot about how they can be tax efficient. That can mean a lot of different things, of course, because there are many forms of taxes. They could be thinking about property taxes, sales taxes, income and capital gains taxes, or wealth transfer taxes (taxes on wealth that is transferred from one person to another). And within these types of taxes, there are also levels of tax – local, state, and federal taxes to boot!
Good afternoon, we wanted to share some current thoughts on the markets and
portfolio construction given this challenging investment environment.
We wanted to provide an update with our latest thoughts given the continued volatility across capital markets and the escalating situation in Russia / Ukraine.
We feel fortunate to be a couple of weeks delayed in translating our thoughts in writing for the year ahead since the investment landscape has changed considerably since the beginning of this year.
About six weeks ago, we wrote a summary about some of the key personal tax elements to proposed tax law changes introduced by the US House Ways and Means Committee on September 13, 2021. Much has changed since then, and the purpose of this writing is to provide a further update based on the latest Congressional revisions to that proposal.
By now, you’re certainly aware that the House Ways & Means Committee released a mere 881 pages of legislative text last week containing several proposed changes to the current federal tax regime that would significantly impact wealthy Americans in a number of ways.
We suspect that a common conversation topic over the final weeks of the year will be how glad people are to turn the page on 2020 and begin a new year.
Each year investors like to reflect upon their investment portfolios, and we find this to be especially true at the end of a decade. As always, the last decade was full of countless surprises from an investment perspective.
Early this year former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and past Chairwoman Janet Yellen spoke to a group of economists in Atlanta. At one point the following exchange occurred between them: Dr. Yellen said, “I don’t think expansions just die of old age,” to which Dr. Bernanke replied, “I like to say they get murdered.”
Another year is in the history books and as is often the case, global equity markets behaved in a manner most investors were not expecting. U.S. large cap stocks booked their first negative year in a decade and only their second negative year since 2003. U.S. small cap equities and non‐U.S. equities underperformed U.S. large cap equities; bonds were flat to negative; and hedge funds had a difficult year again. Ned Davis Research found that 2018 was the first year since at least 1972 in which no major public asset class returned at least 5%.