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...affect a growing number of middle-class Europeans - and will likely hit millions more in the decade to come. "Inheritance tax used to be a problem for the rich. Now it's a problem for you and me," says Anne Young, a tax expert at the Edinburgh financial-services firm Scottish Widows, who calculates that about 1 in 3 of Britain's 24 million households now have estates that would fall within the taxman's reach. Young herself admits she has an inheritance-tax "problem." Blame the explosion of house prices. Unlike their parents, European baby boomers tend...
...developing innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs, and to provide employees with meaningful work and advancement opportunities, and investors with a superior rate of return." At the risk of sounding obtuse, isn't that the mission of every company? I mean, what firm has as its raison d'être "to provide shoddy products and poor service while ticking off customers, treating employees like dirt and impoverishing investors...
...industry jargon, "high-net-worth individuals" (HNWIs)?people with fortunes of at least $1 million. The number of Asians who attained that status hit 2.4 million last year, up 7.3% from 2004, according to the 2006 World Wealth Report by Merrill Lynch and human-resources firm Capgemini. That compares with 2.8 million HNWIs in Europe, where the growth rate last year...
...inclined to prize. One vehicle with almost irresistible snob appeal is the "Ultimate Wine Fund" offered by the private-banking arm of the French giant Soci?t? G?n?rale Group. Available primarily to customers of SocG?n's Asian private bank, the fund is linked to a specially created Cayman Islands firm that, acting on the advice of wine experts and auction houses, buys and stores select vintages. Investors wanting to cash out after the minimum one-year holding period may redeem their shares for actual bottles of wine, which can be drunk or resold at a profit (or loss) by a wine...
...sizzle?bragging rights and a sense of privilege?as well as the steak. Thomas Meier, head of Asian private banking at Bank Julius Baer, one of Switzerland's oldest private banks, argues that his institution's classic pedigree gives it a particular edge in Asia. Headquartered in Zurich, the firm started out more than a century ago as a simple foreign-exchange office on the city's exclusive Bahnhofstrasse, where Switzerland's largest banks?and costliest jewelers?are housed. "Asians love history," says Meier. "If you can show them 120 years of history, it gives them an enormous level...