美国富人避税生意兴起：税务优化策略规模超万亿美元

There has been a wealth creation boom over the past decade. Almost 500 million SpaceX shares have swapped hands on the first trading day of the world's biggest IPO. The share of total wealth held by the richest Americans is now at the highest level since World War II. It's created an undeniable inequality crisis that has politicians calling for the wealthy to contribute more. When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich.

Well, today we're taxing the rich. Meanwhile, there has been a quiet boom in one corner of Wall Street that is rapidly stripping away taxes for the wealthy. It can feel like tax avoidance is as American as apple pie. The rich have always endeavored to lower their tax bill. Take the example of one-time presidential candidate Donald Trump. She complains that Donald Trump took advantage of the tax code. All your friends take the same advantage that I do, and I do.

The trend is called ‘tax alpha,’ which is the pursuit of lowering one’s tax bill while generating more profit along the way. There's more than $1 trillion invested across a multitude of tax-optimized approaches right now. Wealth advisors are pitching it as a critical defense tool to get ahead of any rising tax bill from the IRS. It's the perfect mix of improving technology and zero-fee trading that has enabled this market to grow so much.

There are many startups getting in on the tax optimization trend, and also established players like Blackrock and Vanguard. And one big pioneer in this trend is the systematic hedge fund, AQR Capital Management. I have been waiting for this for my entire career. You can't do things that are just about taxes, but once you're doing it, you should run money different for your taxable investors, and that is shockingly new.

There's a long menu of these tax-optimized strategies, ranging from direct indexing to 351 conversions into ETFs. Right now, one of the main and hottest strategies is tax-aware long-short, which has been estimated to run around $100 billion. The strategy starts with heaps of borrowed money. It adds layers of positions betting on and against companies you'll find in a standard index fund like the S&P 500. So if the market goes up, your shorts lose money, and if the market goes down, your longs lose money.

The strategy is tailored to manufacture a pot of losses that can offset the tax owed on capital gains. David Hauser is a serial entrepreneur who has sold off his own companies and now invests in others. I personally get a lot of fun and joy out of tax alpha because it is sort of a game to understand what are the underlying rules. How do they work? How do they matter? For me, it makes a lot of sense to use a long-short strategy and be able to harvest more of those losses up front and be able to put them into high tax bracket years now, and hopefully have lower tax bracket years later in life.

The US government has been slow to respond to these modern investment tactics. These strategies might comply by the letter of the law, but was it the intended spirit? The IRS allows for capital losses to be written off when investments genuinely lose money. These strategies are being set up with the explicit goal of generating losses in corners of your portfolio. The IRS never anticipated computers executing hundreds of trades a day just to generate paper losses.

The US Treasury Department is poised to increase scrutiny of at least one of these tactics. For now, it means less government revenue as the federal deficit expands. I totally understand all the critiques about this strategy, but what's really important to understand is the government has set up these rules, and playing within the rules is exactly what we're supposed to do. I think that's the important differentiation.

The conversation can quickly lead into a debate around the inequality crisis, which is approaching historic levels. The long-term result of this is a two-tiered system. You'll have the average person who's drawing their regular salary and paying standard taxes. Then you'll have a separate class of investors whose portfolios are trying to reduce their tax bill every single day. The result of this is you will have a permanent advantage baked into the system for the very rich.