Pretty good summary of a real estate developer mentality: Heads I pay off my loan and get a return on my equity, tails the bank is gonna be stuck with the mortgage.
This is on paper one of the most "financially literate" cabinets ever (Bessent, Feinberg, Lutnick, Wright, Burgum, McMahon, etc.) but in practice most of the policies are degen gambling.
Author is basically very scared of DSA, because he knows that it's ready for power politics on their own terms.
When you are socially conservative but economically left wing, you are going to spend your debates arguing with a right wing / center guy who has 60 "non-partisan" studies about why liberal economics are good.
When you are in the DSA, you evacuate the question by mentioning Gaza at will. DSA is basically an American version of the french LFI, and they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.
> they are constantly able to stonewall or turn any debate by going to moral issues.
Only with debaters who let them. "I take that as an admission that you have no answer to all those studies that state that you're wrong economically. Let us note that well, and then move on to talking about Gaza, since you seem to want to go there."
> Foreign companies and pooled investment vehicles (such as mutual funds or hedge funds) must still report information about foreign owners. But they will no longer have to identify Americans who help them register to do business in the United States, according to a Treasury Department advisory.
> And Treasury will delete any information it has already collected about U.S. business owners, the advisory said.
I mean this is literally an invitation to use "bagmen" with a US passport to hold interest / investments in the US. The part about deleting already collected data is also pretty crazy.
Bessent, Trump and crew were born and often got rich before modern laws like credit act and such. Their sensory experience is being untouchable white guys providing cover for bad guys. Trump isn't commonly associated with money laundering for no reason.
They're dismantling white collar crime tools which were bad enough as is while installing license plate readers to track blue collar folks buying weed.
They’re just trying to recapture their own personal glory days and don't care who else it fucks over.
Stephen Miller even gloats about being like the power mongers of history who just took what they want.
I'll assume you know what tax loss harvesting means in its usual parlance (i buy 2 stocks at 50 dollars each, the first is worth 40 eoy, the 2nd is worth 60 eoy, i sell them both = I have no capital gains tax).
Where AQR innovates is in the following:
1. Suppose I am invested in my 401k into some sort of active etf. The past 10 years have been good, but I've noticed the performance is struggling lately. If I want to switch managers, I have to sell my stock and thus pay taxes on both the alpha (i.e manager skill) and the beta (i.e what the market did). But I don't want to pay the tax on the beta, I want to stay invested in the market swap my alpha.
2. The 2nd part is where it starts getting sketchy. From point 1 onward, we now want to separate our alpha and our beta. The first step is what everyone does: Leverage. Instead of owning a longly only mutual fund or active ETF, I now do the following: I buy a passive ETF (that behaves like the market) and then a long-short/beta neutral etf/strategy that will give me alpha. So for a 100 dollars invested, I now get 100 dollars of market exposure and then a varying amount of alpha exposure (it can range from 60 dollars in a conservative 130/30 or 100 dollars in a more aggressive 150/50). Key part: We solved the problem in point 1, I don't ever have to pay capital gains tax on my market until I genuinely want less exposure to the market.
3. Now comes the fun part: In a typical rising market, what would happen to our supposedly "market neutral" portfolio? On average, we would expect our longs to go up and our shorts to lose value. I could rebalance by selling some of my winners, but then I would be getting hit with the 35% short term capital gains tax which sucks. So what I do is something different: I don't do anything on the long side, I close out my short, open a new short and then carry forward my losses to the next year. With that, some time later, once I want to sell my long positions because they no longer have alpha, I can do it both using the 20% long term capital gains tax (ideally) and I will have accumulated tax losses from my shorts to further reduce exposure. And ideally I generate so many losses that I can offset a lot of my market portfolio gains.
Tl:dr It's basically pretty serious leverage and using constantly renewed short positions to keep delaying the realizations of capital gain taxes by creating tax losses. If you invest 100 dollars in a fund like this, the dream is that at the end of 10 years you have an 500 dollar portfolio with 300+ dollars of tax loss carry forward. The other fun part is when the initial 100 dollars comes from some sort of taxable event, like a sale business, and this strategy can actually cut taxes on that as well.
To make it very simple: Borrow money, get a 2nd portfolio that generates a lot of realised losses and unrealised gains, get a tax write off.
Simple example: I have 100 dollars, I go the 150/50 route.
Year one: I make 10 dollars on my main portfolio, I lose 8 dollars on the shortside (realised) and and make 9 dollars on the long side (unrealised).
Year two: I make 11 dollars on my main portfolio, I lose 9 dollars on the shortside(realised) and make 10 on the long side (unrealised).
Result: I invested 100 dollars and at the end of 2 years have 123 dollars. If I sell I have 17 dollars of tax loss carry over, so I pay taxes on 5 dollars worth of gains.
This is a gross simplification but that's the basic idea of it. AQR has an even more egregious product called Delphi Plus (that IMO is gonna eventually get IRS into their office) that can create losses that offset agains your ordinary income.
>Now another EA has followed the path of making a lot of money relatively quickly and losing it just as fast, using the exact same arguments for why it happened.
I would be very interested to know what he did with the management and performance fees (and how much they were) he gathered over the last 3 years. Just the perf fees from 2025 are probably enough to set him up for life. If he reinvested not so great.
> I would be very interested to know what he did with the management and performance fees
I mean, I'm pretty sure he pocketed the money and got richer. Most hedge fund compensation structure has always (ironically, I'd add, given the name "hedge" fund) incentivized volatility over long term performance.
>The union said employers should take steps to cool down workplaces once temperatures exceed 24C, with workers able to stop working if temperatures reach 30C, or 27C for those doing manual labour or working outdoors.
Geneva already has a version of this. You have to stop outside work at 13h00 unless it's necessary, in which case you have to take 45min breaks for every 15 minutes of work. However the threshold isn't 27C but rather like 32C (from what I understand)
> Belgium: 29°C for light physical workload, 26°C for a moderately heavy physical workload, 22°C at heavy physical workload and 18°C at very heavy physical workload
> Hungary: 31°C for sedentary and light physical work, 29°C for moderately physical work and 27°C for heavy physical work
> Latvia: Maximum working temperature for indoor work of 28°C
> Montenegro: Maximum working temperature for outdoor work of 36°C
> Slovenia: The air temperature in work areas must not exceed 28 °C
(although I don't see any obvious similarities between the countries that do and don't have such protections, but based on that list it does seem that former Yugoslav and Soviet states are overrepresented)
is it really an alternative? i'd rather do a 4 hour night shift without breaks than working 8 hours like this in the heat. what am i supposed to do with a 45 minute break? if i am a bricklayer or example, i'd still be stuck on a badly cooled construction site. seems totally not worth it to me. even worse considering that normally breaks are not paid.
if we assume that this is the middle of the day, so i work 2 hours normally, then 4 hours with 45 minute breaks and then another 2 hours normally, i might as well just work 2.5hours normally, take a 3 hour break and then work another 2.5 hours normally.
so no, really, i don't see any benefit in that arrangement.
breaks are not work time. you are entitled to breaks, but unless they are quick bathroom breaks they don't count as work, and in places where you have to stamp in to start work you actually have to stamp out for each break. at least that's the law in germany. since germany is one of the countries with stronger employee protection globally, i can hardly imagine any country offering more than this.
>If you are not a resident, don’t bother trying unless you plan to have 30M or more in the account.
If you are UHNW every single bank, from private(Pictet etc) to universal, will bend over to have you. For US accounts it depends heavily on what you want to do with it. If it is just to keep your money and do investments by yourself 500k will be more than enough. It will be expensive in terms of trading fees/money transfer fees/ etc versus neobanks but that's the way it is.
The issues come if you want a wealth advisor. There are not that many wealth advisors with an SEC license (required to manage US clients) and most of them simply won't assume the risk unless they can have 1.5mio USD to manage, with something like 0.6% - 0.8% management fees p.a. Below 500k forget it because then you are categorised a private client according to FINMA and it is a pain in the ass compliance wise.
>If you are a resident, you can easily open a normal account in minutes
>But, how much truth is there to her claims that the trial was a witch hunt
It's not a witch hunt, she just sucks at doing the same thing that everyone else does. It's fairly standard to go hard in the EU elections in order to buff up your party's treasury, but RN/FN was just comical in how openly they did it.
Francois Bayrou/MoDem had the exact same scheme but because he is much smarter than Le Pen so he never left behind a smoking gun whereas she openly said what she was doing in front of multiple people (and RN/FN had a huge loyalty problem at the time).
This is on paper one of the most "financially literate" cabinets ever (Bessent, Feinberg, Lutnick, Wright, Burgum, McMahon, etc.) but in practice most of the policies are degen gambling.