Investment Funds Taxation, ETFs and Mutual Funds and China, Growth, Crisis and Development

M. Hill is going to start with a topic he likes to cover around summer every year and it's a topic that maybe isn't the most exciting to talk about but it is one that directly impacts your investment returns and that's taxes. You'll often hear how ETF's tend to be more tax efficient than mutual funds but you may not fully understand why that's the case and that's what the author going to focus on here today. There are a few things that the author thinks every investor should be aware of as it relates to taxes and one of those areas is the tax differences between ETFs and mutual funds. If you compare the before and after tax returns of a hypothetical investor from 1926 through 2016 and there are some nuances to the data but what the author found was that large cap US stocks returned 10% annually before tax after-tax that number was only 8% for government bonds before tax returns were five and a half percent after tax only three and a half percent which by the way that barely outpaced inflation, which was two point nine percent. M. Hill is going to start with a topic he likes to cover around summer every year and it's a topic that maybe isn't the most exciting to talk about but it is one that directly impacts your investment returns and that's taxes. You'll often hear how ETF's tend to be more tax efficient than mutual funds but you may not fully understand why that's the case and that's what the author going to focus on here today. There are a few things that the author thinks every investor should be aware of as it relates to taxes and one of those areas is the tax differences between ETFs and mutual funds. If you compare the before and after tax returns of a hypothetical investor from 1926 through 2016 and there are some nuances to the data but what the author found was that large cap US stocks returned 10% annually before tax after-tax that number was only 8% for government bonds before tax returns were five and a half percent after tax only three and a half percent which by the way that barely outpaced inflation, which was 2,9%. China is the second largest economy in the world, home to the largest population in the world and the most aggressive economic expansion in modern history. Most people would not have seen China go from a collection of mostly peasant farmers into the economic powerhouse it is today. Within their lifetimes the economic development of China has amongst other things also contributed heavily to the massive drop in absolute poverty we have seen around the world, Hugo Passemard really wants to focus on is China's economic rise because in a sense that is probably not a fair label to put on it. But also China in 1949 was a nation ravaged by years and years of war and exploited by its allies at the time namely America and the Soviet Union. This nation was once the wealthiest in the world and now it was struggling to feed itself it was these kinds of conditions that gave rise to the political system that would go on to define China in the later half of the 20th century. The Belton Road initiative is set to be the most influential economic development project in recent history. It will be an investment of trillions of dollars connecting dozens of nations with roads, rail lines, shipping routes and most importantly trade deals, but for all of the impressive figures there is an equally concerning list of problems centered around the nation that looks to be the ringmaster of this whole project.Shanghai, a 21st century metropolis that typifies modern China. It is a glistening city with space-age architecture and a population driven to build their own respective fortunes just this city alone one of hundreds of cities in China has a gross domestic product larger than countries like Sweden Norway and the United Arab Emirates. China, what is still the world's foremost industrial economy has apparently been knocked down a peg or two as it's emerged into the new decade...