Author: News Room

The storied mansion where former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy stayed following the assassination in 1963 of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, is listed for $26.5 million. She bought the 18th-century residence in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., known as the Baker House, to be her personal home, but decided to relocate a year later as the four-bedroom, four bathroom home attracted too much attention from the public and especially the paparazzi. The Georgetown home, now combined with two other homes, spans 16,300 square feet with 13 bedrooms. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Federal-style mansion…

The recent bank crisis stemmed from the loss of confidence in the banking system following the sudden collapse and seizure of Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB VB ) by the FDIC on March 10. While analysis shows U.S. banks to be solvent overall, the concern about banks has spread globally. The challenge of analyzing bank safety is that a severe loss of confidence can actually cause an otherwise functioning financial institution to come under duress. This analysis uses a systematic methodology to monitor the strains on the banking system weekly via the U.S. Banking System Stress Monitor. Aside from the market…

Estate tax planning experts and many affluent taxpayers are aware of the multiple advantages of what are known in the technical jargon as “Intentionally Defective Grantor Trusts” (IDGTs), which are irrevocable trusts that are intentionally drafted to trigger grantor status. This means that all income and deductions of the trust for federal income tax purposes are considered to be income and deductions of the grantor. This type of trust is also known as “disregarded.” Grantor trust status can result from any one of a number of provisions within the trust, including allowing the grantor to replace trust assets with assets…

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Next Avenue Social Security’s Earnings Test tops my list for our government’s most senseless and personally financially destructive policy. The Earnings Test is a massive tax that isn’t. It’s a tax that’s levied and then secretly returned making no money on balance for the government (as measured on an actuarial present value basis). Its sole purpose is to con Social Security beneficiaries below age 67 into thinking that earning money beyond a di minimis amount will come at a huge loss in current net income as well as lifetime benefits. Here’s how Social Security describes the…

I’ve heard no less than two anguished stories from two people I know in the past week who are steaming over not getting tax refunds. Ensuring that your federal tax return gets to the IRS and you receive a refund — if you’re owed one — is a matter of following a simple process. Here are five easy steps the IRS recommends: * Get Your Docs in One Place. Taxpayers should gather all documents, such as Forms W-2 and 1099, and any documents to support tax deductions or credits like education credits or mortgage interest payments. * File electronically. You…

How much money is Taylor Swift making on her “Eras” tour? Will her latest haul make her a billionaire? Experts told me in December that her 52-date concert tour could gross $620 million — of which she could keep about $500 million. This week those experts stuck with their estimates — but suggested that she could net even more. Since that $500 million estimate assumes an average ticket price of $215, her take could be as much as $1.5 billion if the average ticket price is $700 as one expert told me. If you add in possible international dates, her…

We love to get questions from readers, and I recently got one from a CEF Insider member about commercial real estate, after Bank of America BAC (BAC) recently said the sector could be the next one to tumble. Let’s dive into that, because this fear has been driven by the same kind of overwrought media coverage we saw with regional banks (an issue that’s been addressed, by the way, with no depositors or taxpayers losing money). And that fiasco, you no doubt know, gave us a nice “buy the dip” opportunity on, well, pretty well everything. The media has set…

A few months ago, I came across a Tweet that clearly enunciated something that had rankled me for a long time as an early-stage investor: Source: Twitter I believe firmly that, for early-stage startups, TAM is meaningless, and over-focusing on TAM actually ends up being counter-productive in the long-run. For those who aren’t familiar, TAM is shorthand for Total Addressable Market. It is a metric meant to provide a rough heuristic for how many users a company’s product could ever possibly reach, in the extreme upside case. For instance, one could calculate that the TAM of the internet is currently…

What happened with SVB, and what is happening with banks? On March 10, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) closed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank. You may have seen that investors are concerned about First Republic Bank, and that UBS has acquired Credit Suisse – a Swiss bank. The failures of SVB and Signature (and current concerns about banks generally) illustrate a fundamental banking problem – a mismatch of expectations between bank depositors and bankers. Depositors want to be sure that their money is safe (as safe as money in the bank!). They subconsciously think that their bank…

By Jan Lopatka PRAGUE (Reuters) – Central bankers across central Europe have doubled down on their hawkish policy messages in the past two weeks in a bid to persuade investors to ditch bets that they will soon begin an easing cycle, and their message is starting to gain traction. Their policy warnings come despite a European market downturn in the wake of Credit Suisse’ demise, which raised bets that global banks would begin to ease monetary policy. As central Europe’s central banks were faster than their major peers to hike rates, they had also been expected to lead the way…