We're often surprised what we can agree upon when our choices are limited... Whether we SHOULD withdraw from the world stage as military enforcer is becoming a moot point. We don't have the money to do otherwise...
For those of you who are interested (or concerned) about this topic, they're going to be discussing it on CNBC in about 2 minutes.
I don't understand why people don't get that they're going to pay this tax, and its more significant than they realize. Instantly the markets for stocks will widen out. Right now lets say AAPL is trading at 80, well if i have to pay a .25% tax, then my market for AAPL has to be 40 cents wide(at least) I'll sell for 20 cents more than fair value and buy for 20 cents less, all to cover my costs. You the consumer pay 20 cents more per share than the stock is worth, and you lose 20 cents when you go to sell. Point of note, the current market in AAPL is 2 cents wide, and it would move to 40 cents wide. So who really loses? Yes you wipe out the speculators, but you also take that money away from regular customers. If you want, we can extend this logic to the options markets. The options market makers, knowing they'll lose 20 cents when they go to hedge their stock, will only buy/sell and option with at least 20 cents in edge. This will basically eliminate the entire covered call industry. Currently, most OTM options in AAPL are about 2-3 cents wide, this would instantly balloon to 23 cents wide, making most OTM options non-existent, and all other options prohibitively expensive. This tax is conceivably the worst idea I've ever heard.
WTH? No longer accepting comments for his article. Nice to know they are so encouraging of free speech.
Someone needs to make the point that this industry is one of our biggest exports in that it brings in foreign money.
Yet another alias on ET coming back from the dead . . . Only your 2nd post since Sept. of 2007??? Give me a break. I really wish that Baron would stop this crap that allows people to "park" screen names only to use them at a later date as one of several aliases. Coward.
Sighhhhhhhhhhh this has NOTHING to do with tax revenue......this is nothing more then another attempt to drive the little guys out of business and force more volume into the the elite on wall street....think about it:
To actually defend Obama, his economic team is way too smart to listen to this monkey on CNBC right now. Summer and Geitner are waaaaay to smart to do something like this.