Some interesting things I found in the above updated piece: "Due to surging trading volume during the pandemic, the tax rate to fund the SEC is being lowered to just half a cent per $1,000 starting Thursday." "The odds are still against a financial transaction tax being enacted, but for the first time in a decade this proposal should be considered as a viable policy option rather than just another talking point," said Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at Compass Point Research & Trading. James Angel, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in market structure and regulation, authored a Chamber of Commerce-funded paper in 2019 that found a financial transaction tax would hurt Main Street by driving up the cost of trading by more than the amount of the tax. "There is no such thing as a tiny tax that raises big revenue," Angel said in an interview. He pointed to how some other countries, most notably Sweden in the 1980s, abandoned such taxes after trading volume vanished and revenue underwhelmed. (Of course, the United States, with its deep financial markets, massive economy and the world's reserve currency, is not Sweden.) No slowdown in sight for IPOs or SPACs "It really messes up the market," Angel said. Greg Valliere, chief US policy strategist at AGF Investments, said the chances of a financial transaction tax are "very slim" because moderate Democrats would be unlikely to back it. "It would be a disaster. It's a pandora's box that should not be opened," Valliere said. Of course, it's possible that FTT proposals in Congress get scaled back, including by lowering the rate or excluding smaller blocks of trades. We believe the markets today are rigged to favor high-frequency traders," said Kelleher, the Better Markets CEO. "The industry has taken visible upfront commission fees and disguised it into invisible payment for order flow." In other words, it's not really free to trade. Kelleher thinks Congress should focus on taxing orders, not transactions, because a staggering amount of all stock trade orders (some estimates say 99%) are canceled because of high-frequency trading strategies. Critics say those orders are evidence that high-speed traders are manipulating the market by creating the appearance of demand where there is none. "A financial fee on orders could be the death knell for predatory high frequency trading," he said. "Everyone will be better off — except for the predators."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hong-kong-shocks-traders-first-113125557.html Ugh. Hong Kong raised it's FTT for the first time since 1993 (To 0.13% from 0.1%)
From reading the piece it sounds like China most likely has a hand in this? Also these last few paragraphs in the piece are pretty scary: “The industry is strongly dissatisfied,” Christopher Cheung, chief executive officer of Christfund Securities and a lawmaker who represents brokerages in Hong Kong, told reporters on Wednesday. One concern among market participants is that more stamp-duty hikes may be in the offing, according to Shujin Chen, an analyst at Jefferies Financial Group Inc. “It is a warning sign,” Chen wrote in a report. “Stamp duty rate has been used as a means to adjust the stock market in mainland China, so there is concern it may be the same for Hong Kong in future.”
https://www.rollcall.com/2021/03/09/senators-ponder-faster-trade-settlement-after-gamestop-frenzy/ ...faster trade settlement dates being discussed here as well.