Resource Search

In the first quarter issue of Global Foresight, Rockefeller presents an in-depth review of the risks and opportunities facing global investors in 2013. David Harris, Chief Investment Officer, discusses how the slow mend in the global economy, low interest rates, and other factors should keep equities as a logical core of most portfolios. Jimmy Chang, Senior Portfolio Manager, explores investor unease with the current global economic environment, but notes that staying anticipatory and opportunistic will be important for long-term investors.

Most successful families of wealth regularly hold family meetings, offering members of multiple generations a forum to discuss business and financial issues, including family business succession and difficult transitions, while also commemorating and celebrating family milestones.

While private equity serves as a compelling addition to a well-structured portfolio, it presents investors with unique challenges in the areas of cash flow management, diversification and liquidity. Implementing private equity secondary funds can help offset some of these challenges while presenting investors with favorable return characteristics.

Sudden wealth is not something that happens only to the young founders of a social network. It can happen to elderly couples who have spent their lives building a business. It can happen to a chief executive receiving multi-million dollar dividends or vested options, a middle class young man newly married into a family of wealth, a newly divorced woman, a 25-year-old whose trust payment has suddenly kicked in, and the middle-aged inheritor who now has more money than she ever dreamed about.

Under certain conditions, illiquid wealth can quickly evaporate, or worse – assets can suddenly start to behave like liabilities. If you are successful, then you are wealthy – on paper. Illiquid assets carry a high potential for risk on the balance sheet. But individuals who hold illiquid assets tend to have many wealth planning opportunities too. In this white paper, Ballentine Partners CEO and Chairman Roy Ballentine takes a closer look at this wealth management challenge.

Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) offer a unique combination of liquidity and cash flow to investors while serving as preferred access vehicles to capital markets. MLPs trade on major exchanges, like most publicly traded corporations. As partnerships, they avoid corporate income tax at the entity level, affording them a distinct cost of capital advantage over corporations. They predominately invest in energy infrastructure and touch many parts of the domestic energy supply chain, serving as a critical component of the general economy.

After many months of heated debate, Congress passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (“ATRA”), which President Obama signed into law on January 2, 2013, averting the tax side of the so-called “fiscal cliff”. ATRA permanently extends the middle-class tax cuts, raises income tax rates on the wealthiest and, hopefully, will bolster economic growth.

Just before midnight on January 1, 2013, the House of Representatives adopted the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. There were few surprises except, perhaps, the extent to which numerous deduction and credit provisions remain intact. While the Act is expected to raise approximately $650 billion over the next 10 years, Congress must now contend with a February deadline to address spending reductions and the debt ceiling.

Keeping in mind that permanence and certainty are relative terms when it comes to tax legislation, Congress has finally provided a platform that allows for longer-term planning than we have had in the past. Although the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 was passed too late to provide the certainty that is so important for year-end tax planning, there are still opportunities in the new year.

After briefly plunging over the “fiscal cliff” – the combination of tax increases and spending cuts that automatically came into effect on January 1, 2013 – Congress quickly passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (the “Act”), which has now been signed into law by President Obama. This white paper summarizes those aspects of the Act that Withers believes are the most relevant to wealth owners in the areas of gift and estate taxes, personal income tax, and business tax.