Academic

The Senate Finance Committee is interested in taxing sovereign wealth funds.  Or at least they want to learn more:  Baucus and Grassley have asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to write a report. 

Meanwhile, on the non-tax front, Gilson & Milhaupt have posted Sovereign Wealth Funds and Corporate Governance: A Minimalist Response to New Mercantilism.  They suggest suspending the voting rights of SWF equity investments (the voting rights would return when sold to a private investor).  Seems very sensible, and a good start, although I'm not sure that it's sufficient to fully address the concern.  If you are a 10% owner of a publicly traded corporation, I'm not sure you need voting rights or a board seat to have influence over corporate policy.  Still, Gilson & Milhaupt's proposal seems like a sensible place to start the corporate governance discussion.  See also Paul Rose, Sovereigns as Shareholders.  Paul prefers the best practices / code of conduct approach.

I hope to post my own tax-focused paper in a couple of weeks.  Stay tuned ...

Prior posts: 

Current Law on Taxing Sovereign Wealth Funds: Why It's Good to Be the King (March 5, 2008)
Taxing Sovereign Wealth Funds (March 4, 2008)

Related Research:

Two and Twenty (forthcoming NYU L Rev)
Taxing Blackstone (forthcoming Tax L Rev)

Press Coverage:

AP / SF Chronicle (March 7, 2008)
Financial Week (March 5, 2008)
NYT Deal Book (March 5, 2008)
Dealbreaker (March 4, 2008)