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  • New Tax Bills on the Horizon

    It seems like only yesterday the Bush tax cuts came into effect, although it was 2001.  I think back to those days when we evaluated the impact of the new law:

    We were amazed at how much clients would save with the new 15 percent tax rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends. 

    Although few understand Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), we were grateful that the higher exemption amounts wouldn’t increase this tax burden.

    We were excited about the increasing estate tax exemption and marveled over the idea of estate tax repeal. 

     

    The Bush tax laws are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, making it time for the new administration and Congress to set forth its tax policy. The Taxpayer Certainty and Relief Acts of 2009 were introduced to the Senate by Max Baucus, D-Montana, Senate Finance Committee Chairman, on March 26, 2009. The focus of the ...

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  • Are you asking, “What next?”

    At around 2:40 p.m. on Thursday, May 6, (2010), I pulled up Yahoo Finance to see how the market was reacting to the demonstrations in Greece earlier that day. To my surprise, with every website update, the market dropped another 200 points.  At one point, the DJIA was down almost 1,000 points.  My stomach churned.  I can recall only two other times when the market experienced such a radical drop: on 09/11/01 and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  What was going on?

     

    Why the 1,000 point drop?

    I scanned the headlines.  As expected, Greece agreed to accept aid from the rest of Europe and some demonstrations got a little out of control.  The news hadn’t changed from the morning updates.  Before the day was over, the irregular trading activity was widely reported as a trading error.  More than a week later, investigators still do not know what exactly ...

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