The Tobin tax explained - FT.com by Martin Sandbu
The Tobin tax was originally proposed in the early 1970s by James Tobin, an influential American macroeconomist and recipient of the Nobel prize for economics. His idea was prompted by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, which replaced an arrangement of fixed exchange rates ultimately based on the US dollars peg to gold with a period of volatile floating exchange rates. Tobin proposed to reduce this volatility with a small tax for instance 0.1 per cent levied on every amount exchanged from one currency into another. He wanted to discourage short-term currency speculation, which makes it difficult for countries to implement independent monetary policies by moving money quickly back and forth between countries with different interest rates. Tobins goal was to throw sand in the wheels of global finance with a simple tax that would be small enough to make short-term purely financial movements uneconomical without being a burden on trade. The proposal never caught on in the 1970s but received renewed attention during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s when it became a cause celèbre for the anti-globalisation movement. A number of organisations, such as France-based Attac, sprang up to campaign for a Tobin tax long after the economist had died in 2002. Today the Tobin tax is back in vogue, with the European Commission, France and Germany all pushing for a broad financial transactions tax. They argue that it will make the financial industry pay a fairer share of the burden brought on by the financial crisis as well as compensate governments for their rescue of the industry. Some also argue that the tax can reduce what they see as harmful high-frequency trading. The original purpose of putting the brakes on currency speculation has been somewhat eclipsed among activists who have increasingly seen the Tobin tax as a good way of raising revenue for economic and social development. Tobin himself disowned activists adoption of his proposal for revenue-raising purposes, which he thought missed the point of the proposal: to reduce the socially harmful effects of finance while keeping its benefits. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2013 8:39 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Tobin Tax is madness for Europe Keith wrote: > http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9985 > 673/Tobin-Tax-is-madness-for-Europe-and-economic-war-against-Britain.h > tml >From the article: One French banker told Les Echos that the Tobin Tax was 'a weapon of mass destruction that is going to ruin our financial sector'. Once again confessing my ignorance of financial operations, it nevertheless seems to me that these guys are saying, "Our whole casino finance system depends on minute by minute arbitrage moving vast sums from one notional asset to another. Of *course* it has nothing to do with the real world, 'Main Street' or ordinary people but it's how we get rich. It's *our* bubble, OURS, !!OURS!! and you can't be allowed to interfere! Certainly not for some archaic and outmoded reason like 'the common good' or 'national interest'." It has amused me to note that the Globe & Mail's financial section uses unabashed casino terms -- bets, in play -- in its front pages that carry news for Bay Street suits but switches over to homely, thoughtful terminology in the middle pages where "middle class" folks, those in the lower reaches of Keith's 20% with money to invest, may be looking for reasonable arguments for or against this weeks fashion for or against mutual funds, gold, bonds, foreign securities, pension funds etc. etc. Assuming, once again, the mantle of "fiction guy", here's a quote from Bruce Sterling's "The Littlest Jackal" (1996). The speaker is a lower-echelon functionary of the Russian mafia: "We're past the Marxist thing," said Kohklov, warming to his theme.... "Now it's different. This time, Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption. Top to bottom. Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell *anything*: the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We'll sell the forests and the Russian sky. We'll sell our souls." Are we "past the Capitalist thing" in the USA? Does Canada's PM Harper have a burning desire for Canada to get "past the Capitalist thing" so's not to fall behind his southern neighbors in "absolute corruption"? Thirty-five years ago, a friend loaned me a few thousand bucks to buy and refurbish a new studio. She could have asked (but didn't) to have me set up as a corporation and held equity. (The latter would have been a bad choice because one of the two large commissions that justified buying the studio fell through due to the client's health.) I repaid the loan on schedule. But either way, that's what I think of as "capitalism". The daily swapping around of notional money in quantities an order of magnitude or more greater than the global GNP [1] isn't capitalism. The effect of such swapping is, as far as I can see, (see "ignorance", supra) intrinsically bubble-producing. That's what it's all about. So unless the governments that putatively represent "real people" are, as in the Sterling frame, entrained in "a new kind of absolute corruption", it's high time that a little anti-foaming agent should be applied in the form of a tax on financial transactions. - Mike [1] I can't find the figures off hand. But isn't that about right for the size of money-trading market? -- 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
