Ball Dropped On Carry

Carried interest, essentially performance fees, for private equity firms should be taxed as income rather than capital gains. But Blackstone boss Stephen Schwarzman and many of his friends unsurprisingly object, sometimes to hyperbolic extreme. And the additional revenue wouldn't make much of a dent in the U.S. deficit. So despite the symbolic value, the idea is losing out to politics. The latest Senate plan to remove the carried interest loophole last week became a victim of the horse-trading around extension of Bush-era tax cuts that would otherwise expire at the end of the year - a negotiation that brought a tentative deal between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans on Tuesday.

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