There’s a ticking time bomb in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful Bill’

THIRTY years ago, when I was a rookie reporter, a veteran writer offered me sage advice: whenever presented with a government or corporate document that is more than 100 pages long, hunt for hidden bombs.

Donald Trump’s thousand-page (plus) “big, beautiful Bill” is a case in point. Since the House of Representatives passed it last week, this fiscal act has been (rightly) lambasted for many reasons: it favours the rich over the poor; cruelly cuts social safety nets; and recklessly expands the debt. Even Elon Musk is upset.

But what investors should also fret about, if they care about the state of Treasuries or are a non-American entity holding US assets, is a clause buried in the bowels of this behemoth called section 899. This would enable the US Treasury to impose penalties on “applicable persons” from “discriminatory foreign countries” by increasing US federal income tax and withholding rates by up to 20 percentage points on their US investments, on a variable scale. It might thus be viewed as a novel “revenge tax” (as some lawyers call it) that Trump could use to bully friends and foes alike in trade negotiations.