Source Who Revealed How Taxes Steal for the Rich Rewarded With Five Years in Prison

floofloof@lemmy.ca to News@lemmy.world – 1149 points –
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This guy obviously shouldn’t be in jail, can someone expand on the guy who the article says was forced into psychiatric care?

Anyways this one legal loophole has been around for awhile—rich people can acquire really low interest loans against their assets so they do, and they use that to pay their expenses, and when it comes tax time they write down that they made some money but they also took out a massive loan so actually they’re in the red. If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself. Maybe if everyone who could did it they’d close the loophole? Obviously you couldn’t get rates as low as a politician who chills with the Schwab CEO.

If you own a house you could probably leverage this to some extent yourself.

That's a mortgage. Most people use it to pay for the house itself, but you are free to use the money in other ways if you already own the house. It's probably the only leveraged asset many people own, and the interest rate isn't particularly low at the moment, but it's the same thing as getting, say, a line of credit against your yacht.

It's called a secured loan. And a house secured loan (aka mortgage) isn't as good as a stock secured loan.

Stock secured loans rates were basically zero for quite a few years. I think this is why all the venture capital suddenly dried up. Both owning a stock AND taking out a loan based on that stock at 0.25% APR is an insane deal. A year of interest on a million dollars is $2,500. And the stock you're holding will outperform that. After a few years you just sell a bit of the stock to continue paying the interest of the loan.

Now that the interest rates are 6-7% things are different. Suddenly your yearly payment on that million dollar loan is $65,000 instead of $2,500. And your stock may not make 6% this year to pay for it.

It's kind of a miracle this return to reality didn't cause more of a collapse.

I agree that mortgage rates didn't drop to that level, but the same sort of trick worked on them. House prices were rising at anything up to 10% per annum, well above the mortgage rate, so you could refinance regularly, probably reduce your Loan to Value level, and also free up more capital to pay off the upcomming interest payments.

As you say, these methods have pretty much stopped working as the growth and interest figures have flipped. I don't see much of a risk of a true market collapse though as there are simply too many powerful people and institutions with too much to lose if that happened. It could be rather turbulent for the rest of us though.

There are also equity based life insurance policies I think you can do similar things. My guy explained it to me as the justification for the policy and of course because I'm a stupid simpleton, I've never looked at actually trying to do something with it.

Lol, I don't want to even be in dept to myself.