决定开始好好学习investment. :) 趁这里没版主就开始在这里灌水啦.
在nytimes 上看到这篇文章. 因为胆小. 最感兴趣的是 municipal bond 了. 还不太清楚什么是A.M.T.
JOSH GONZE, a municipal bond credit analyst at Thornburg Investment Management, was just as surprised as other investors when the alternative minimum tax caught up to him and some of the so-called tax-exempt municipal bonds in his personal portfolio suddenly became taxable.
"It just crept up behind me all of a sudden," Mr. Gonze said ruefully.
The A.M.T.'s bite is painful. A yield of 4.3 percent on a 30-year municipal bond that is subject to the tax - say, one that finances an airport - has an aftertax yield of 3.1 percent when subjected to the 28 percent A.M.T.
Although the A.M.T. was intended from its start in 1969 to make the very rich pay some taxes, inflation is causing it to snare more and more people with much smaller incomes. Unless there is a tax adjustment, the impact will be startling in the 2006 tax year, as millions of unsuspecting investors with modest incomes are afflicted by it.
What's an investor to do? Ask a lot of questions before buying individual municipal bonds or municipal mutual funds.
The answer is not simply to jump automatically to the new non-A.M.T. funds being marketed by the mutual fund industry. Many of those funds avoid bonds that could be subject to the alternative minimum tax, but others still buy them. And in some cases, investors may be better off in funds with A.M.T. bonds.
The class of municipal bonds that is subject to the alternative tax is called private activity bonds. This class, which accounted for about 7 percent of total muni issuance last year, includes bonds that usually benefit projects like single-family housing and airports that have corporate rather than government backing. The bonds are popular because they offer yields that are as much as a half a percentage point higher than those of other comparable municipal bonds.
Another concern for investors is that these bonds could become much less attractive, resulting in price declines and capital losses, if the A.M.T.'s spread is not slowed.
Some mutual funds state on their Web sites whether they hold bonds subject to the A.M.T., but many funds don't. David E. Hamlin, team leader of the tax-exempt income group at Putnam Investments, said that the industry needed to improve disclosures. Putnam, he said, was researching enhancements.
The name of a fund may not be a useful guide. Funds that call themselves tax exempt or tax free can still keep up to 20 percent of their assets in bonds subject to the alternative minimum tax.
T. Rowe Price has five broad municipal funds that are called tax-free, but three of them still hold bonds with A.M.T. exposure.
Other funds are truly A.M.T.-free, like two in the Oppenheimer fund family, but they can have large exposures to junk bonds that bring in higher yields but make the fund riskier. Still others, like the Oppenheimer Rochester National Municipals fund, have enormous exposure to A.M.T. bonds. Last year, more than 40 percent of that fund's return was subject to the A.M.T.
Some fund companies don't trumpet their non-A.M.T. offerings. Thornburg's Limited Term National and Intermediate New York funds are 100 percent A.M.T.-free but give no such hint in their names.
It may be of some solace that municipal bonds are especially attractive at the moment. As of last Thursday, the yield on 10-year, tax-exempt triple-A municipal bonds was 86.3 percent of the yield on taxable 10-year Treasuries. That means someone in the top tax bracket of 35 percent has a taxable equivalent yield of 5.42 percent on such a muni bond, compared with 4.08 percent for the 10-year Treasury note.
Why is the alternative minimum tax, which blocks the use of many popular income tax deductions, reaching so many more people? There are two reasons: the A.M.T. is not indexed to inflation, and President Bush's tax cuts have lowered what people must pay under the regular income tax.
If there are no changes in the law, millions of taxpayers will be in for an A.M.T. surprise in the 2006 tax year, according to a study by Leonard E. Burman and Jeffrey Rohaly of the Urban Institute and William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution. The number will surge that year unless Congress extends an adjustment that has slowed the spread of the A.M.T. for two years
Among those with incomes of $50,000 to $200,000, some 30 percent will be subject to the A.M.T. in 2006, the study said, up from only 2.5 percent in 2005. That is 14.7 million filers, up from 1.2 million. While most tax-exempt interest is paid to those with incomes of at least $200,000, more than 35 percent went to people with incomes of $50,000 to $200,000 in 2003, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mutual fund families are taking different approaches to shielding investors.
Putnam has shifted strategies. It stopped buying A.M.T. bonds in a national muni bond fund in late 2003 and changed the name to the A.M.T. Free Insured Municipal fund last November. Mr.. Hamlin of Putnam said that portfolio managers had also reduced the A.M.T. exposure in Putnam's other national and state muni bond funds. Bonds subject to the A.M.T. now run from 1 percent to 12.5 percent of assets in these funds.
AT T. Rowe Price, Hugh McGuirk, head of municipal bonds, said the company's portfolio managers had reduced their exposure to A.M.T. bonds to make the funds more marketable. But managers are free to buy more A.M.T. bonds.
And some investors, he said, would be better off paying the A.M.T. For example, a wealthy New York City resident would have had a return of $406 after paying the A.M.T. on 2004 earnings from a $10,000 investment in the T. Rowe Price New York Bond fund, which had 10.1 percent of its assets in bonds subject to the alternative tax. The return from the same investment in the T. Rowe Price Tax Free Income fund, which had no A.M.T. exposure, was only $395, even though that fund's yield was 4.9 percent higher.
Nuveen Investments has five closed-end mutual funds that are A.M.T.-free, but it buys bonds subject to the alternative tax in other funds when managers think that the extra yield is worthwhile. William Fitzgerald, head of fixed-income investing at Nuveen, said the firm was betting that Congress and the Bush administration would take action to reduce the spread of the alternative tax. Nuveen therefore is not reducing its A.M.T. holdings in other funds.
Mr. Hamlin said Putnam was not betting on a Washington fix for the A.M.T. "It's very difficult to make a strategic bet on political outcomes," he said. That's good advice for municipal bond investors.
