Cretins, we\’re surrounded by cretins.
There’s really only two problems with this idea.
1) It would not be the banks, not even the bankers, paying the RHT. There really is something called tax incidence, no, really, and it will be all consumers of financial prodcts that pay the tax. That’s us, the citizenry then.
Heck, one of the UK’s few Nobel Laureates, Sir James Mirrlees, has pointed out that trasnaction taxes are to be avoided anyway as they cascade through the economy.
2) Such transaction taxes will increase volatility, not decrease it. Sorry, but this is also true. Speculation, all those derivatives, they dampen price volatility, not increase it. Yes, I have read your reports and they’re all bollocks, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
So, let’s have an RHT so that we, us, can pay more taxes and so that we can have the financial markets gyrating ever more wildly.
Doesn’t sound so good now, does it?
They is stupid. The RHT is stupid.
The best kind of tax on banks is the bank asset tax (or the bank liability tax – both sides of balance sheet add up to the same figure, more or less). It’s better than RHT, corporation tax, bank bonus tax, anything, plus we already have it, at the ludicrously low rate of 0.075% something like 1% seems a bit more like it.
Clearly, the bank levy or bank asset tax should only be applied to UK assets (or liabilities), then it’s like LVT for banks. Problem solved.
Keep up the good work Tim Worstall. I saw your post yesterday on the cretin’s website that you refer to, but they are afraid to post my opposing opinion.
The absurd Robin Hood Tax, Tobin Tax, or Financial Transaction Tax would stop most of the actual activity of the financial industry. The industry is based on making transactions. The entire economy is based on making financial transactions. Everyone’s job depends on these transactions.
Can you believe the madness? The cost of the tax on any transaction is greater than the profit. If the increased costs of the tax cannot be entirely passed on to the consumer, they will leave and seek markets to the East or go out of business.
As you know about Sweden’s experiment with a short-lived, broad-based and comprehensive transaction tax, government bonds for example had a rate of only 0.03 percent. Trading of bonds fell 85 percent the first week, bond futures trading dropped 98 percent, bond options stopped trading entirely. The Swedish government could not raise money from selling bonds. The government had predicted revenue from bonds alone would raise 1.5 billion kroner. They got just over 3 percent of that. Considering the loss of other types of tax revenue because of the tremendous drop in financial, economic activity and job losses, the actual total tax revenue from all financial instruments was negative.
Some light relief perhaps before filthy bourgeois work on Monday 😉 Sing to the tune of the old USSR anthem.
All together now!
We give ourselves to glorious leader,
He is almighty
We give our wallets and our first born,
For he is glorious leader
Down with the right they hate your soul,
They kill panda’s for fun
Hail glorious leader,
For he will kill the Bourgeois scum.