Although as Family Wealth Report readers will have been reminded (see this article here), PPLI hasn’t been a prominent wealth protection/risk mitigation tool, but the benefits of it are starting to gain attention.

An article in Bloomberg (May 29) is headlined: “Blackstone's Tax-Free Hedge Fund Pitch Woos Even More Clients.” The Blackstone group’s connection is that it owns created diversified portfolios designed for use in PPLIs, which include hedge funds, middle-market lending, securitized mortgage funds, and stocks and bonds. The report added that the “tricky part with these investments is that they’re frequently taxed as ordinary income with marginal rates that approach 50 per cent in high-tax US states. Inside a PPLI, they aren’t taxed at all”.

Lombard has written about PPLI in these pages

Other firms operating in the PPLI space include Swiss Life, Cohn Financial Group and Vie.