Las malas ideas no mueren y con un poco de mala suerte se convierten en ley. Los degenerados de los Europeos quieren convencer a Obama de cobrar un impuesto a las transacciones financieras trading, etc. Ellos saben que si lo imponen solo en Europa los Europeos abandonarian esos mercados y se vendrian para aca, si Obama lo propone aca, probablemente se vayan a Hong Kong o a otro mercado que quiera atraer a los inversionistas. El problema para Obama es que los republicanos jamas aprobarian semejante atrocidad. Estar atentos.
REVIEW & OUTLOOKNOVEMBER 4, 2011
The Tobin Tax Mirage
Sarkozy and Merkel lean on Obama for a levy on financial transactions.
What happens when you get George Soros, Tom Harkin, Bill Gates, Ralph Nader and the Archbishop of Canterbury together in a French hotel room with a stick of incense and a magnum of champagne—and turn off the lights?
Answer: the Tobin Tax.
OK, so we need to work on our punchlines. But a tax on financial transactions is exactly what these characters have all endorsed in one form or another as the miracle cure to the world's economic ills. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have also picked up the cause, and they are leaning on President Obama to endorse it at this week's G-20 summit in Cannes, France.
So here we go again.
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Like bell-bottoms and wide lapels, a financial-transaction tax is a fad that goes back to the 1970s. It started as Nobel laureate James Tobin's idea for reducing currency speculation in the 1970s. It then became a rallying cry for the anti-globalization crowd in the 1990s and resurfaced again three years ago as a way of taking out aggression on bailed-out bankers.
The basic idea is to impose a seemingly small tax—between 0.01% and 0.1%—on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, foreign exchange and the like. Depending on the justification du jour, this magic tax would discourage speculation, penalize bankers, pay for bank bailouts, or raise large amounts of revenue for cash-strapped governments.
The main reason the scheme hasn't been enacted anywhere is that even a small tax on every financial transaction would drive business someplace else unless everyone was in it together. The Europeans, who have been toying with imposing a transaction tax of 0.1% on securities and 0.01% on derivatives, estimate that such a move could wipe out 90% of derivatives trading in Europe and cost the British economy and its Treasury tens of billions of pounds a year. And still they favor it, hoping only that the idea will in time gain global favor and leave nowhere for capital to flee.
Enter Barack Obama. The U.S. government is desperate for revenue to pay for Mr. Obama's spending sprees. But the President faces a Republican-controlled House of Representatives that is highly resistant to raising taxes amid a weak recovery and a looming election.
For Mr. Obama, a tax that putatively falls on speculators, traders and bankers ticks a lot of short-term political boxes. It throws a bone to the Occupy Wall Street crowd by dinging the financiers. It brings in (on paper) a decent amount of money, thanks to the huge volumes traded in some markets. It would give the President another opportunity to claim that his opponents across the aisle were favoring Wall Street greed over Main Street need.
And by banding together with the Europeans, Mr. Obama would claim that this tax wouldn't merely drive jobs, businesses and tax revenues from Chicago, Boston and New York to London.
The trouble is, they would still probably pack up and go—perhaps to Switzerland, or Hong Kong, or any other enterprising state that wanted to attract talent and capital. As for those fabled revenues, if governments shut down 90% of derivatives trading in London or New York, they would soon run out of transactions to tax. The appeal of a Tobin tax rests on the myth that there is some vast pool of financial transactions that are sufficiently price-insensitive that you can skim a few dollars off each and no one will notice or care, creating a money-machine for the state. Memo to Cannes: These finance guys make the kind of money they do because they notice where the pennies add up.
Two years ago at the G-20 summit in Scotland, Tim Geithner played the grown-up by shutting down speculation that the world was ripe for a global financial transaction tax. For all we know, the U.S. Treasury Secretary is still of that view. It's also America's good fortune that only Congress could enact the tax, which isn't likely to happen.
Then again, as the history of the Tobin tax shows, bad ideas never die, and sometimes they even survive to become law. If the President wants to do the global economy a favor and assert America's economic leadership, he could put politics aside for an afternoon and explain the real-world consequences of James Tobin's ruinous idea.