I have been saying that the US government has increasingly been intruding in the marketplace or applying financial repression for implicit political reasons.
This time the object of their engagement appears to be American expats and possibly overseas investment by American residents! In other words, the US has declared war with her own citizens.
From Financial Times’ Gillian Tett [bold emphasis mine]
This summer, the senior management of one of Asia’s largest financial groups is quietly mulling a potentially explosive question: could it organise some of its subsidiaries so that they could stop handling all US Treasury bonds?
Their motive has nothing to do with the outlook for the dollar. Nor does it reflect fears about the US debt ceiling (or the risk that the US will soon default if it fails to raise the legal limit on bond issuance).
Instead, what is worrying this particular Asian financial group is tax. In January 2013, the US will implement a new law called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca), that forces all global financial companies to report details to the IRS, the US tax authority, of any clients linked to the US with more than $50,000 in an account. These rules, quietly passed by Congress last year, would partly put the responsibility on the bank or asset manager – not just the individual – to make this filing.
The IRS insists that these measures are simple for banks and asset managers to implement; they just need to perform an electronic “sweep” of their clients to track those with more than $50,000 in an account and obvious connections with the US, such as an address, Treasury officials argue.
“The US interest is to have reporting on accounts to stem the tide of offshore tax evasion,” says Manal Corwin, a senior official at the US Treasury, which hopes the measures could net billions of dollars of badly needed new revenues.
While this logic might sound sensible, the new rules leave some financial officials fuming in places such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore. Little wonder. Never mind the fact that implementing these measures is likely to be costly; in jurisdictions such as Singapore or Hong Kong, the IRS rules appear to contravene local privacy laws. After all, as Terry Campbell, head of Canada’s banking association, points out, the rules are essentially akin to “conscripting financial institutions around the world to be arms of US tax authorities”.
What has left some financiers doubly angry is that Congress introduced the law with little overseas consultation – but the IRS is now threatening heavy penalties for non-compliance.
More specifically, the IRS is threatening to impose a withholding tax of up to 30 per cent on sales of US assets by groups that it deems to be “non-compliant” – and the assets could include US shares or US Treasury bonds.
Hence the fact that some non-US asset managers and banking groups are debating whether they could simply ignore Fatca by creating subsidiaries that never touch US assets at all.
“This is complete madness for the US – America needs global investors to buy its bonds,” fumes one bank manager. “But not holding US assets might turn out to be the easiest thing for us to do.”
Whether anybody follows through on this threat remains doubtful. In practice, banks in places such as Canada, Australia and Germany say that it would probably be impossible for them to not handle US Treasuries or stocks. Some are consequently considering whether they should shun US citizens as clients instead.
In the name of tax evasion, this time taxes are being deployed as instruments for repression and implied interventions on the actions of market participants—“threatening to impose a withholding tax of up to 30 per cent on sales of US assets by groups”.
Also regulations imposed on foreign institutions will likely to create geopolitical frictions and other untoward effects, some of which have been explained above.
Maybe legendary investor Jim Rogers got them all so roiled up.
Again we are seeing increasing signs of desperation.
Could capital controls be next?
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