Video from 2011 of Antonio Weiss -- Obama nominee -- opposing Obama policy on offshore profits
Did Obama not know his own nominee opposes his position?
The Obama administration has repeatedly slammed companies for parking money overseas to avoid taxes. The president himself essentially called the tax inversions tactic unpatriotic. During a 2011 CNBC appearance, Weiss took a different tact, justifying parking money overseas as a facet of our tax environment (5:20):
HOST: On our show we do talk a lot about cash on the balance sheet....more than half of that or roughly half of that two trillion let's call it is on foreign balance sheets of U.S. Corporations –
WEISS: Absolutely, absolutely.
HOST: How does that resolve itself. More deals in-market?
WEISS: What it means is the $1.9 trillion of corporate cash which the Fed reports non-farm non-financial cash, fully half of that is off-shore. And what it generates is off-shore investment, off-shore M&A, and cross-border M&A by definition. And so the discussions in Washington about whether to consider tax holiday or tax reform are fundamentally linked to where this cash is ultimately going to be invested.
HOST: What is your expectation then? Let's assume we don't get anything out of Washington that would encourage bringing that cash back. Will it ultimately be deployed in-market in the form of deals?
WEISS: Well, companies are retaining cash. I mean, companies had well over a trillion dollars of cash on their books even in the depths of the crisis.
HOST: They had a lot of debt on their books as well.
WEISS: They had debt against that absolutely. But what it means is, you know the incentive to invest abroad is simply too great for their to be substantial repatriation and I think the statistics bear that out.
Read more: http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-senate-democrats-led-liz-warren-are-revolt-against-obamas-wall-street-nominee?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark