Since the financial crisis of 2008, global markets have been surprisingly resilient. Investors who continued to follow disciplined strategies have recovered much of their losses, if not their confidence. Professional advisors have all worked hard...

Our company, Fiduciary Trust Company International, was appointed executor of an estate of a client who died in 2010. Our client's wife had died in 2005. The value of the estate was approximately $50 million, consisting of a marital trust created...

In March 2009, Bernard L. Madoff pleaded guilty to federal charges involving a Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme, money contributed by new investors is used to make payments to existing investors. At some point, the perpetrator can't bring in enough...

Anyone who has checked the news lately knows that mergers and acquisitions are picking up. And as sure as baseball follows college basketball, philanthropy follows liquidity events. There are several reasons for this. Some reasons are obvious...

The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 (2010 Tax Act) brought about an increase in the gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax exemptions to $5 million each.1 Many clients are...

A recent headline in The Chronicle of Philanthropy tells the story: Recession's Hard Lessons Lead to Changes in Endowment Policies: The bulls may be back in control on Wall Street, but the painful lessons that endowment managers endured just a...

Corporations around the world responded aggressively to the global recession and financial crisis, clamping down on spending and hoarding massive piles of cash. In the United States, where cost-cutting was especially dramatic, nonfinancial firms...