Global Tobin Tax Proposed

Adair Tobin of the Financial Services Authority in the UK is proposing a Global Tax on ALL Financial Transactions.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aJqRedRZpa5c

Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Economist Henry Kaufman, the president of Henry Kaufman & Co., criticized U.K. Financial Services Authority Chairman Adair Turner’s proposal for a global tax on financial transactions.

The so-called Tobin-tax would merely “pass on that cost to the borrower,” Kaufman said yesterday on Bloomberg Radio and Bloomberg Television.

Turner has been criticized in the U.K. since proposing the levy, which would distribute proceeds to fight poverty and other causes, last week in a Prospect magazine interview. The controversy has bolstered calls by the opposition Conservative Party to dismantle the FSA, the U.K. financial regulator, if it wins the next general election.

“I think that’s the wrong way to go,” said Kaufman, the author of “The Road to Financial Reformation.” “I think if you want to limit the growth of debt and financial intermediaries, there are different ways to go.”

Willem Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics, wrote in the Financial Times yesterday that a “Tobin Tax” would be “unfortunate fiscal intervention.”

James Tobin proposed a tax in 1971 on currency trading to deter speculation in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of pegging currencies. Tobin, who died in 2002, won the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work on financial markets. Poverty campaigners say the tax would raise money to help developing economies.

Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said such a tax would threaten London’s future as a global business center.

‘Big Push’

“This isn’t the way to go, unless of course you want to kill London off as a financial center,” said Ferguson, who was also a guest on Bloomberg Surveillance. “One of the games that I think Adair Turner may have missed here is the big push that’s currently coming from Berlin and from Paris to use this crisis to really squeeze London, which for so long has been a thorn in the side of the Eurozone.”

Turner, 53, became FSA chairman last year, a week after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history and roiled financial markets worldwide.

“If increased capital requirements are insufficient, I am happy to consider taxes on financial transactions -- Tobin taxes,” Turner told Prospect. “Such taxes have long been the dream of development economists and those who care about climate change -- a nice sensible revenue source for funding global public goods.”

In addition to the FSA, Turner heads the Committee on Climate Change. In a previous job as director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, he earned the nickname “Red Adair.”

The FSA said Turner’s comments weren’t FSA policy and were merely a response to questions at a roundtable discussion.

“I sometimes find myself asking if this was just a throwaway remark, which got blown out of proportion because it was reported in a rather obscure magazine,” said Ferguson, who is also an economic adviser to the Centre for Policy Studies in London.

 

2000 Trillion $ in derivatives?

Tax them 1% and the people of the world are debt free!!!

 

“If increased capital requirements are insufficient, I am happy to consider taxes on financial transactions -- Tobin taxes,” Turner told Prospect. “Such taxes have long been the dream of development economists and those who care about climate change -- a nice sensible revenue source for funding global public goods.”


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The truth always comes out and in this case and every case where a leftist wants to raise taxes, it boils down to wealth redistribution and advacing the socialist agenda.....

"development econoists" = socialists

"those that care about climate change" = wealth redistribution on a global scale.