American nightmare for Aussie investors

US President Donald Trump's tax plan – his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill – accelerates the long-running slide of the United States into a tax haven for multinationals. Worse still, the draconian foreign tax clauses in the OBBB threaten to make life a nightmare for any Australian company or individual that operates a business or holds investments in the land of the free.

If the version of the bill that recently passed the US House of Representatives were to become law, Australian pension funds and corporate investors in the US would suffer shareholder value losses to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, Australia can do about it. The OBBB is a neutron bomb for the retirement savings of Australians, some A$500 billion of which is invested in American shares.

The US technology industry is the prime mover behind this heinous new tax regime for foreigners, of which Australians are just one of the many targets.

The big dogs of the US tech industry – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai – are not really credited with driving this. In Washington DC, it is Trump buddy and libertarian ideologue Peter Thiel seen as the guiding hand.

However Nadella, Zuckerberg, Cook and Pichai – the biggest beneficiaries of global tax lurks – have led a quiet but effective multi-year lobbying blitz for the US government to punish foreign governments that have tried to counter their tax shifting efforts or to impede their monopolistic behaviour in any way.