By Walt Hickey

Tax

On February 28, 2023, the United States Treasury Department reported in its daily balance sheet that it got a $7 billion estate or gift tax payment. This is, needless to say, incredibly odd. Prior to then, the highest receipt was a $1 billion payment in 2017, and the kind of person who would need to die to necessitate that size of a bill would be worth between $17.5 billion and $40 billion. The thing is, we usually know who those people are, as that’d easily put them in the Bloomberg billionaire index and get them on Forbes. Even more so, that kind of wealthy person will often opt for some tax maneuvers to soften that estate tax blow by sequestering the money in trusts and whatnot. So, who was it? Given what we know, a low-key Texas fund manager who pulled off reliable returns for a large book certainly could have flown below the radar of the Forbes set.

Tim Fernholz, Sherwood News

Back to Work

A recently released felon with a cinematic life story has turned his life around and apparently found substantial success in the two years following his release from prison after founding a small business. Regrettably, it is Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer better known as the “Merchant of Death” and the inspiration for the 2005 Nicolas Cage movie “Lord of War,” who just two years after being traded back to the Russians was reportedly instrumental in brokering a $10 million arms deal to send automatic weapons from Moscow to the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Bout denied involvement with the deal, which will send AK-74s — the upgraded version of the iconic AK-47 assault rifle — to Yemen. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bout became the architect of a massive international arms trade hawking ex-Soviet guns to destabilized nations.

Benoit Faucon, Michael R. Gordon, Warren P. Strobel and Alan Cullison, The Wall Street Journal

Milton

Hurricane Milton went from a mild little marine tempest to a cyclone that is freaking out meteorologists. Over Sunday night, the intensity increased from Category 1 to Category 5, its peak winds increased from 85 mph to 180 mph over the course of just 24 hours, it’s now the strongest Gulf of Mexico hurricane this late in the year on record, it’s one of just seven Atlantic or Gulf hurricanes to increase from Cat 1 to Cat 5 in 24 hours, and about 48 hours and 675 miles stand between it and Tampa Bay, a metropolitan area of 3.3 million people. The storm’s pressure came in at 897 millibars on Monday night, the fourth-lowest of any Atlantic hurricane on record.

Matthew Cappucci and Jason Samenow, The Washington Post

McCheese To Hamburglers: Drop Dead

McDonald’s is suing nine suppliers, including Tyson Foods, JBS and Cargill, alleging that they violated antitrust laws and conspired to artificially increase the price of beef for McDonald’s. McD’s claims they colluded to reduce the beef supply and keep prices high, and wants treble damages as well as a judgment affirming the existence of that conspiracy, which it says started in 2015 when the suppliers began reducing supply after a drought ate into profit margins. In 2020, the Department of Justice investigated a purported price fixing; in 2021, during the alleged conspiracy period, JBS USA alone had net revenues up 25.8 percent over the value in 2014.

Quinn Wilson, Bloomberg Law

Watching

A new report from the Center for Digital Democracy lays out how streaming television networks have become massive information dragnets, with viewer data being aggressively monetized and targeted through automatic content recognition software on millions of people. According to the reports, NBC Universal alone has data on 200 million adults in 90 million households, coded with 3,000 behavioral attributes. Disney, the report says, has access to data on 110 million households and 260 million devices.

Erik Gruenwedel, MediaPlayNews

Hidden Treasure

A book of riddles published in France in 1993 by Régis Hauser and Michel Becker contained 11 puzzles and a hidden 12th one, prompting decades of treasure hunting from a community of over 200,000 players across the world. The hunt is called “On the Trail of the Golden Owl” and appears to have come to an end last week with a reportedly successful find. The target? An owl made out of 3 kilograms (6 pounds, 10 ounces) of gold and 7 kilograms (15 pounds, 7 ounces) of silver, valued at somewhere around €150,000 ($165,000).

Diane Jeantet, The Associated Press

Aging

A new study published in the journal Nature Aging argues that humans are hitting the upper limit of life expectancy given advances in medical technology and genetic research. Specifically the study is talking about life expectancy as in the average number of years a baby might expect to live, not any particular outlier in one way or another. In general, that average figure has slowly improved, by about 2.5 years per decade in developed countries during the 1990s, but slowing to about 1.5 years per decade in the 2010s. That’s indicating that marginal increases in the average lifespan of large populations are getting harder and harder to squeeze out; for instance, even if all deaths before age 50 were eliminated, the average lifespan would only increase by around 1.5 years.

Mike Stobbe, Phys.org

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