Comments on: James Packer now half the man his father was

By: Andrew Seagrim

Andrew Seagrim — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Enough about the brilliance of Kerry Packer please. If he had taken Sir Franks empire and sold it, then invested it all in an index fund of Aus ordinaries, Kerry would have been 25% wealthier in 2006. James I expect will continue this underperforming.

By: Venise Alstergren

Venise Alstergren — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

I don’t wish to be churlish, but I wish I could afford to lose $2 billion. I mean I would hate to lose that much, but I would be somewhat comforted by the $5-6? billion I still had left.

By: Goanna

Goanna — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Guess what son, there is life after death, but not for people who’ve made a small fortune.

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

I am old enough to remember the iniquity and inequity of death duties which every now and again some surprising people want to bring back. I say surprising because I would expect some of them at least to take the view that leaving it to politicians and bureaucrats to decide how much to extract from a family’s savings and investments is ludicrous. News of such huge declines in the net worth of the rich as has occurred this year to Andrew Forrest and James Packer, not to mentions any number of London and New York based financial entrepreneurs who have personally lost hundreds of millions should remind us, first, that death duties are certainly not needed to ensure that riches are unlikely to pass easily to successive generations of a family, and that it is in all our interests that the very rich should take big risks. If we make the biggest risk the danger that government will take 40 to 90+ ;per cent of a family’s wealth (over 90% in the case of one of my closest family members) then it stands to reason that a great deal of management time and professional expertise will not be devoted to avoiding the death duty disaster and diverted from taking a big calculated risk on some great innovative business with huge potential which needs anxious care and attention. Nor should it ever overlooked that the diversion of a lot of a nation’s best brains into tax avoidance actually does succeed in making sure that the very rich don’t have to pay the taxes which the merely comfortably off and accidentally unlucky pay.

By: Andrew Seagrim

Andrew Seagrim — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000