It wouldn’t be a day too soon. And it now seems that major economies are coming around to support the old Tobin Tax.
A Tobin tax, suggested by Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin, is a concept initially associated with a tax on all spot conversions of one currency into another. The tax is intended to put a penalty on short-term financial round-trip excursions into another currency. Tobin suggested his currency transaction tax in 1972 in his Janeway Lectures at Princeton, shortly after the Bretton Woods system of monetary management ended in 1971.
Organizations, such as War on Want have been proponents of such taxation for years and the British Prime Minister and the French President have previously been advocating for it.
EU calls for tax on bank transactions
European Union leaders have urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to consider implementing a global tax on financial transactions.
[…]
But while the tax has been promoted by Mr Brown and his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy, the US and the IMF have been less enthusiastic.At a meeting of G20 finance ministers last month, IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn described a tax on financial transactions as “a very old idea that is not really possible today”.
The EU’s member states are clearly hoping to change his mind.
War on Want has launched it’s campaign this weekend – go vote in their poll:
A good idea?
The prominent economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz is fully supportive of the campaign.
Standing in front of me is Joseph Stiglitz, clutching a Styrofoam cup of black coffee. Over here to promote his latest book, Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy, the American Nobel Prize-winning economist is at 4 Millbank, home of the Westminster TV studios.
[…]
What’s particularly moving him today, he says, is that we’ve been presented with a great opportunity — one that unites much of his past and present argument. He’s a backer of the campaign launched this week by charities for a Robin Hood tax on financial companies to reduce cuts in public services and assist the world’s poor. Taking 0.05% from world bankers’ transactions would raise £250 billion a year.“The benefits are twofold,” he says. “In general, the tax philosophy should be to tax bad things rather than good — so pollution should be taxed more than work and savings.” And in Stiglitz’s eyes, much of what bankers get up to qualifies as pollution. “Very little social returns come from short-term trading. It results in extreme volatility and excessive trading. So anything that discourages short-termism is to be encouraged.
[…]
Watch these two videos by War on Want:
Vultures
Reluctant Banker
It’s a no-brainer, the public at large is beyond pissed-off by the greed of large swaths of the banking sector. High time for them to pay back!
