|
|
发表于 2009-11-30 01:47 PM
|
显示全部楼层
4# 德国村支书
ZT
Taxing Wall Street Today Wins Support for Keynes Idea
Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- John Maynard Keynes proposed a tax on financial transactions in the middle of the Great Depression, and another economist, James Tobin, revived the idea in the 1970s as a way to counter currency market speculation. Neither effort gained much acceptance. Now, a growing number of economists and politicians argue that it’s time for a levy on trading stocks, bonds, currencies and derivatives.
U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Nov. 7 that a transaction tax might compensate for the billions of dollars that the public has spent on bank bailouts. Government officials in France, Germany and Austria have voiced their backing. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner answered Brown a day later, saying the tax was not something the U.S. would support. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, says the idea has “substantial currency” among congressional Democrats.
Even if political consensus on a transaction tax is lacking -- and Brown and Pelosi both say it would need to be implemented everywhere or not at all -- the idea is attracting supporters worldwide.
“It’s akin to a gambling tax on socially negative activities,” says Andrew Sheng, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission who now advises Chinese bank regulators.
Trades that created big risks to the financial system, with the fewest benefits to the economy, might be taxed out of existence, Sheng says. That’s because the tax would boost the cost of complex financial products, such as collateralized-debt obligations, that have several layers of transactions -- and slim profit margins, he says.
$76 Billion
The funds raised would be substantial: With stock and currency markets ringing up about $900 trillion in turnover each year and derivatives another $625 trillion, a tax of 0.005 percent might raise $76 billion annually, Sheng estimates.
Allan Meltzer, a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says such a tax would harm markets. Traders who provide liquidity might be pushed out.
“Most trading is for efficiency,” says Meltzer, author of a comprehensive history of the U.S. Federal Reserve. “Why reduce the trading and make the markets less accessible?”
Proponents offer the transaction tax as a next step in crafting an appropriate policy response to the financial meltdown, complementing efforts such as boosting bank capital and increasing transparency.
Fat Paychecks
Adair Turner, chairman of the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority, put the transaction tax back into the public eye. He dismayed London bankers by arguing in a Sept. 22 speech that they should focus more on socially useful services and less on speculation, profit and fat paychecks.
While Turner had few backers initially, support for the idea has been building. An opinion poll, published by the Guardian newspaper last week, said 53 percent of voters in the U.K. back the idea, with only 28 percent opposing it. Also last week, the head of the International Monetary Fund, who was initially skeptical of the concept, said his organization would study the feasibility of it in curbing financial excess.
“This is an interesting issue,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in a conference in London. “The financial sector should contribute to the cost of the rescue and to limiting recourse to public financing in the event of a future crisis.”
A month earlier he had dismissed it as a “very simplistic” idea that would be difficult to implement.
Growing Support
Paul Krugman, the winner of the 2008 Nobel prize in economics, endorsed the concept in a Nov. 26 column in the New York Times, joining other prominent economists in favor. Another Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, advocated it in an interview last month.
Although the idea now in circulation is sometimes called a Tobin tax, it actually goes beyond the levy on currency transactions that the late American economist proposed. What might be closer to the current concept is the suggestion by Britain’s Keynes: “The introduction of a substantial government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States,” Keynes wrote in his 1936 magnum opus, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.”
Vincent Reinhart, a former U.S. Federal Reserve economist, says the collapse of the financial system in 2008 left the public so angry that a proposal as radical as a transaction tax just might get done.
Practical Problems
“Politically, such a tax sounds very attractive right now,” says Reinhart, who is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. “Especially in Europe, there’s support for it.”
Some practical challenges may stand in the way. Reinhart questions whether a tax would do what it’s supposed to. Raising the cost of a transaction in the stock market, for example, might shift trading to options, he says, while imposing taxes on options might not garner as much revenue, because derivatives cost a fraction of the underlying security.
Meltzer at Carnegie Mellon reasons that the best way to discourage excessive risk taking by large banks is to force them to hold more capital and to eliminate the government’s implicit too-big-to-fail guarantee.
Insurance Instead?
Requiring banks to carry a new type of insurance might be a better way of making them pay, says Viral Acharya, a finance professor at New York University and a co-author of “Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System” (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). He says that insurance pegged to the threat a bank poses to the financial system would both discourage risky behavior and create a pool of money to pay for a bank rescue. The success of deposit insurance, created in the U.S. in response to bank failures during the Depression, gives this idea weight, he says.
Even though most of this insurance would need to be provided by governments, a portion might come from private companies -- helping to set an appropriate price. In some ways this insurance would be similar to credit-default swaps. The key difference, Acharya says, is that payouts would go to cover a bank’s mistakes rather than reward speculators.
The credit crisis has shown that governments must protect the banking system, and such insurance would simply make the guarantee explicit and make banks pay for it, Acharya says.
“Governments should say upfront the insurance comes from them,” he says.
When Keynes broached the idea of a transaction tax, he did so because he said that the financial world had become one big casino and had lost sight of the role it should play in society. Three-quarters of a century later, the U.K.’s Turner makes the same complaint.
“We need radical change,” he said in his September speech.
His prescription? Keynes’s tax. |
|
狗仔卡
提升卡
置顶卡
沉默卡
喧嚣卡
变色卡