What a greedy statist dumb f---, 0.25%! Sounds like a Merrill Lynch et al shareholder who believes in GWB "free enterprise" or Obamanomics, and a Buy and Mold model. One last swing trade - load up on BGZ, TZA, TWM, RSW etc and turn off the lights as you leave the country. Hope UK totally sinks soonest, as an object lesson for all, before we do any thing so stupid. NB. For the first 15 years, my average holding time was 7-8 years, made okay to good money, never burned due to market timing, stepped out of tech market in Nov 1999. Now a long term investment for me may be a week or two, or over lunch. And some of my ancestors were Royal Navy officers.
If you look at it from the public/non traders' perspective, how do you prevent excessive bubbles or collapses from happening? Unstable prices wreak havoc on the economy. Who caused the run up and then collapse of equity and commodity prices? Weren't traders a big part of that? More stable prices for equities and commodities would be a lot better for everyone, perhaps even better for traders. What else could you do to stabilize prices besides charging a trading tax? Is there a better way?
EFFECT=/= CAUSE! You're correct about stable prices being a sign of a rich (and stable) market, but price movement (and hence, stability as well) is a function of an interplay of many things -- one of the greatest being a (functionally) infinite number of buyers and sellers. Imposing a per-trade percentage tax will reduce buyers/sellers tremendously, and we'll be left with *sticky* prices that ratchet outrageously, and may only occasionally represent what an otherwise-unfettered market would show. This trading-tax idea is a disaster. Sticky prices are not stable prices.
Why do traders have to pay for something they didn't create? What created the housing bubble? 1. Lax lending standards. 2. "Innovative" loans. 3. Securitization of mortgages that transfer most of the risk to the investor. 4. Zero down loans. That in turn created price inflation across the board. Traders make money via volatility. They speculate. They have no vested interest in continued price appreciation which is what a bubble is, albeit parabolically. Investors have a vested interest in it as they almost exclusively make money on the buy side of things by buying and holding. If you want to stop bubbles, you engage in proactive regulation. Meaning, sit down and assess the risk of some new fangled financial activity and act expeditiously to moderate it. But instead what happened is that the so called regulators turned a blind eye and/or encouraged it.
How this stuff works is they throw out a number that won't fly to make the eventual number look better. Like they're giving the traders a break with a lesser number. Showing us how magnanimous they are by only taxing a tenth of a percent or something like that, instead of a quarter. LOL So the final result is a number they pick that won't completely shut everyone down, but will limit things dramatically. That's just the way these nasty things work.
so far i see only very few people,who understands REAL consequences of such tax. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_exchange you have to be really dumb fuck to put such constrains...specially in tough times...
PEOPLE, YOU NEED TO BE POSTING THINGS LIKE THIS IN THE NY TIMES STORY COMMENTS SECTION. YOU'RE PREACHING TO THE CHOIR HERE.