No. of Recommendations: 28
The title refers to the US dollar and section 899 of the tax bill recently passed by the US congress.
For context, a prior post of mine from mid March suggesting that the writing was on the wall for non-US investors in the US, that someone might be coming for your assets.
https://www.shrewdm.com/MB?pid=-2&previousPostID=7..." But for non-US-persons, the #1 risks are getting pretty plain. You may or may not be aware of moves to curtail inbound investment via taxation of portfolio flows, and (separately) talk of forcible conversion of US debt to non-redeemable perpetuals in some circumstances. Plus many things not already on the policy plate but all too plausible....For non Americans, is there a 1% chance of (say) a huge withholding tax on T-bill redemptions that are not rolled over, or withdrawals from US brokerage accounts, or punishing withholding tax on sales? Would a US brokerage one day be asked/forced to apply some rules that might not be lawful under US law? Note that there is already a rule that if a non-US-person sells shares of a listed LLP, the entire sale proceeds (not the profit) are subject to 10% withholding tax which is (in my case) non recoverable. Buy $100 worth of Sunoco, sell at $105, lose $5.50."In short, that was fast!
Section 899 (if I understand correctly) allows the imposition of a 20% tax, in addition to any rate already applicable, on individual or corporate holders of US securities or real estate who hail from from countries that are behaving in an unspecified "discriminatory" way according to the US administration, overriding any treaty rates in place. This is likely to be interpreted to apply to places with digital services taxes, such as Canada or the EU, as such taxes endanger future tech bro funding for US presidents and their inaugurations.
It does not appear to impose taxes on transactions which are not already theoretically taxable in some way, so I think it does not [yet] apply a withholding tax on capital gains from the sale of US securities.
Jim
