CORPORATE TAX INVERSIONS
“The biggest corporate deal of 2015 was also, in the view of many, the shadiest: Pfizer's $160-billion merger with the Irish drug company Allergan. It's a "tax inversion"-Pfizer will in effect be reconstituting itself as an Irish company, in order to lower its taxes-and that's why so many people found it so offensive. Hillary Clinton said that ending inversions wasn't just about fairness but about ‘patriotism’; Donald Trump called the deal ‘disgusting.’ It's got to make you wonder when even Trump finds your moneymaking schemes repugnant.
“The biggest corporate deal of 2015 was also, in the view of many, the shadiest: Pfizer's $160-billion merger with the Irish drug company Allergan. It's a "tax inversion"-Pfizer will in effect be reconstituting itself as an Irish company, in order to lower its taxes-and that's why so many people found it so offensive. Hillary Clinton said that ending inversions wasn't just about fairness but about ‘patriotism’; Donald Trump called the deal ‘disgusting.’ It's got to make you wonder when even Trump finds your moneymaking schemes repugnant.
Meanwhile, the inversion train seems only to be picking up speed. Such deals were once exceedingly rare-according to the Congressional Research Service, there was just one in the nineteen-eighties-but there have been more than fifty in the past
decade,
most since 2009.”
James Surowiecki, “Why Firms Are Fleeing,” in the New
Yorker, January 11, 2016, page 21.
