Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Quiet Day of Consolidation

Gold and silver consolidated into overhead resistance today after the big run this week.

Intraday commentary on the NAV and on Why a Gold Crisis Looms.

See you Sunday evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

The market was light volume and lackluster today when a letter from Ben Bernanke to Darrell Issa was released that suggested a bias to ease 'depending on the data.'

This is nothing new of course, but the market players took it as an opportunity to rally.

There were also rumours and speculation that the ECB would take further action to subsidize rates in their soverigns' debt.

Next week is the end of the month and the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

See you Sunday evening.

Romney Tax Files: Converting Management Fees Into Carried Interest

When Gawker first published the Bain Capital tax return data I remember reading somewhere that one should not bother even looking at them because they are not relevant and won't tell you anything.

That struck me as odd at the time. How could someone just dismiss information like this as not even worth reading? Move on, don't look at them?

Well, apparently that is not the case. They seem to contain some nuggets of information suggesting that Romney was being particular aggressive (euphemism for engaging in extra-legal activity) in misstating not trivial income for the purpose of avoiding taxes.

One can only wonder what those undisclosed personal returns might contain.

I don't want to pick on Mitt in particular, although he is starting to look like a setup to make the other guy look good. And what he had done with his income from Bain is certainly open to interpretation as the author admits.

But rather, this speaks to the 'rule of law' issue and how there is a duality in the US, and some animals are more equal than others. And strangely enough, the barnyard hoots its approval.

"Private equity fund managers are compensated in two primary ways: management fees and carried interest. The management fee, traditionally two percent annually, is paid to the managers to cover overhead, salaries, and so forth. The carried interest, traditionally twenty percent, is a share of the profits from the underlying investments. My paper Two and Twenty described the typical arrangement.

Management fees are taxed at ordinary income rates; carried interest is often taxed at capital gains rates (around 15 percent - Jesse). I focused in the article on why the carried interest portion is better viewed like bonus compensation and should be taxed at ordinary income rates.

Current law on carried interest is already a sweetheart tax deal for private equity, but why not make it better? Private equity folks are not the type to walk past a twenty-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk.

In the 2000s it became common for private equity fund managers to “convert” their management fees into carried interest. There are many variations on the theme, but here’s how many deals worked: each year, before the annual management fee comes due, the fund manager waives the management fee in exchange for a priority allocation of future profits. There is minimal economic risk involved; as long as the fund, at some point, has a profitable quarter, the managers get paid. (If the managers don’t foresee any future profits, they won’t waive the fees, and they will take cash instead.)

In exchange for a minimal amount of economic risk, the tax benefit is enormous: the compensation is transformed from ordinary income (taxed at 35%) into capital gain (taxed at 15%). Because the management fees for a large private equity fund can be ten or twenty million per year, the tax dodge can literally save millions in taxes every year.

The problem is that it is not legal. Because the deals vary in their aggressiveness, there is some disagreement among practitioners about when it works and when it doesn’t. But in my opinion, and the opinion of many tax practitioners, the practices that were common in the private equity industry in the 2000s became very, very questionable, and it’s unlikely that they would have stood up in court.

Gawker today posted some Bain documents today showing that Bain, like many other PE firms, had engaged in this practice of converting management fees into capital gain. Unlike carried interest, which is unseemly but perfectly legal, Bain’s management fee conversions are not legal. If challenged in court, Bain would lose. The Bain partners, in my opinion, misreported their income if they reported these converted fees as capital gain instead of ordinary income."

Victor Fleischer, Romney’s Management Fee Conversions

Read the entire article here.

US Dollar Intermediate Term Chart

Because of the way in which it is constituted, the US Dollar DX Index is largely the 'inverse Euro' chart with some yen and pound and franc thrown in.

Because of that, and as I have noted previously, the index is becoming less meaningful as other currencies, which are not accounted for at all in the index, especially those from the BRICs, gain more importance to the world monetary system. 

And of course the Index represents no commodities including gold and silver.