The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors, + Website

Notes

¹ Parts of this chapter are taken from Greycourt White Paper No. 48: Best Practices Trusts (2010), cowritten with my partner, Thomas R. Moore. The paper is available at www.Greycourt.com.

² Meinhard v. Salmon, 164 N.E. 545 (NY 1928).

³ Thrupthi Reddy, How Not to Get Sued (April 1, 2005). Available at registeredrep.com/mag/finance_not_sued/registeredrep.com/mag/finance_not_sued/. Ms. Reddy was a senior editor at Trusts & Estates magazine.

⁴ At least one trust company, which manages almost all trust assets in its own mediocre products, was recently quoted as bragging that its clients trusted it because “we have no conflicts of interest.” Such is the sad, deluded state to which corporate trustees have fallen.

⁵ Following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, all land on the island was confiscated in the name of the Crown. The king then parceled it out to his lords, who passed it on to their own vassals and so on, via the process of subinfeudation. Obligations, including heavy taxation and severe restrictions on the sale and use of the land, flowed from the bottom up: from the serfs to the higher vassals to the lower and higher lords and so on, up to the king. Because these obligations applied to the holder of legal title, the common-law trust—which divided legal title from beneficial use—was a kind of trick to avoid many of these obligations, especially taxes. In 1535 Henry VIII convinced Parliament to enact the Statute of Uses (a “use” is a trust), which collapsed legal title ...