Biz people

Buffett hits out at 'plutocracy'

Warren Buffett called on the US Congress to maintain the estate tax, saying that plans to repeal the levy would benefit a handful of the richest American families and widen US income disparity.

Buffett (below right), the billionaire chairman of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc, told the Senate Finance Committee that advocates of repeal were "dead wrong" to call the levy a "death tax".

It would be more appropriate to call it a "death present", said Buffett, 77, who is the third-richest person in the world, according to Forbes Magazine.

"A meaningful estate tax is needed to prevent our democracy from becoming a dynastic plutocracy." Heirs to vast fortunes, he said, have already won the "ovarian lottery" and shouldn't be further rewarded by the tax system.

Congressional Democrats are likely to seize on Buffett's comments to bolster their argument that repeal of the estate tax amounts to a windfall for a few wealthy families.

Republicans have pushed to permanently eliminate the tax or reduce the rate and increase the value of exempt estates.

Buffett said that in the last 20 years, tax laws have allowed the "super-rich" to get richer.

"Tax-law changes have benefited this group, including me, in a huge way," he said.

"During that time the average American went exactly nowhere on the economic scale: He's been on a treadmill while the super rich have been on a spaceship," said Buffett.

Rogers says dump the dollar

Investor Jim Rogers urged people to get out of the dollar and says he expects to be rid of all his US currency assets by summer next year.

"If you have dollars, I urge you to get out. That's not a currency to own," said Rogers (right), who predicted the start of the global commodities rally in 1999, in an interview from Singapore.

He is chairman of New York-based Rogers Holdings, formerly known as Beeland Interests Inc.

The dollar fell 9.5 percent this year against a basket of six major currencies as a housing slump slowed the economy and losses stemming from subprime mortgage defaults spread among US banks.

Rogers, who said last month he was shifting out of all his dollar assets, plans to buy commodities, the yen, the renminbi and the Swiss franc.

Interest rate futures traded on the Chicago Board of Trade show a 72 percent chance that the central bank will lower its target rate for overnight loans between banks to 4.25 percent on December 11, its third reduction this year.

(China Daily 11/16/2007 page16)