At 02:00 17/08/2012, Arthur wrote:
The Tobin tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax was originally suggested as a way to slow down the volume of financial transactions of many types. Tobin said something like he wanted to "throw sand into the mechanism..." The Tobin tax was designed to slow down, only as a byproduct would it collect revenues.
The only time the Tobin tax was seriously tried was in Sweden in 1983 on the Stockholm stock exchange. It was scrapped in 1991 when revenues only reached 5% of what was expected. The reason was that the banks, finance houses and private traders that were involved had moved elsewhere, mainly to the Oslo stock exchange in Norway -- which proceeded to grow to a much larger size while Stockholm SE withered.
More than any other, the financial sector of an advanced economy can locate almost anywhere. (In the above case it deprived Sweden of even more tax than the putative Tobin tax.) Once embedded, as in London or New York, banks and so forth may not want to move but they can easily do so if they feel they need to. After the Swedish experience, no government in its right mind would try to institute a Tobin tax, not even America (for corporate tax reasons even New York is tending to lose financial institutions to London, Hong Kong and Singapore).
Keith
The Bit Tax http://library2.usask.ca/gic/v2n4/cordell/cordell.html was designed to collect revenues. arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 2:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Arthur's 1st belief Arthur wrote: > May be time to consider new pricing and taxing ideas for the digital > economy. Somewhere (Globe & Mail? Risks Digest? I forget) I saw a call for taxing financial transactions in response to the automated-trading train wreck at Knight. The idea was to deter myriad speed-of-light trades for a few cents or mils profit each. Dunno if it was just some journalist's two bits' worth or if it's a notion that has legs. By me, the whole stock market is subversive of capitalism. Put money into a business or project: you're committed to the success of that project for the long run. Put money into a project, then try to trade the stock: you've created an incentive for the project to built a Potemkin village. But I guess we're a century or three beyond good sense capitalism. Hmmm... How about a tax on stock trades that's confiscatory during the first 24 hours of ownership; punitive during the first year; then declineing gradually to zero over 3 (or 5 or 10) years? If neccessary, a flat-out, draconian ban on any derivatives that attempt to end-run the tax mechanism. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
