This week’s Dividend Cafe took a funny twist over the last 24 hours.
First, I ended up flying back to California from New York late Thursday night for a Friday matter that came up (I was supposed to fly to California on Sunday). This substantially altered my reading and writing plans for this commentary, along with work issues. On Thursday the market had a little reaction to the shocking – shocking – news that the Biden administration was looking to raise capital gain taxes on high-income brackets. I say “shocking” because it had been, well, you know, on their campaign website all of last year, and discussed and mentioned 37 times since his inauguration. And because nothing in the announcement came with Bernie Sanders replacing Joe Manchin in West Virginia or Elizabeth Warren replacing Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona.
And by the way, as of press time Friday morning, the market is down a whopping ~150 points on the week – a rounding error – after a few up days and down days mostly offset each other this week.
Still, though, the cap gain tax issue does matter, so I wanted to address it this week along with a few other things that seem to be a source of worry right now for many investors.
But you can’t spell “investor” without “t” and I found that out the hard way when I arrived at JFK’s Admirals Club yesterday and the “t” button on my keyboard was not working. I had a DC Today to finish, and ambitious plans for 5+ hours of work on a cross-country flight. Well, I did all I could, but just so you know, a lot of words in the English language have “t” in them – a lot. And doing a “Ctrl-C” and “Ctrl-V” for all your T’s is enough to make someone want to ask for the bartender (I don’t drink, so had to settle for my typing productivity being, well, diminished).
But the use of an iPad Bluetooth keyboard, a munted attempt with the munted keyboard, my desktop at my California office, and a brand new Surface Pro laptop I had overnight shipped the second I discovered the trouble have all coalesced together to make this Dividend Cafe possible. And to think my dad wrote 500-page books on a typewriter!!!
Jump on into the Dividend Cafe!