"I think the tax has a lot of problems at a lot of levels. First, it needs international agreement – most of these transactions are also off market – on unofficial over the counter (OTC) markets which are currently unsupervised. Far from curtailing banks from speculation it would push banks from a low margin execution business for pension and insurance funds where the margins are thin (we would end up paying through increased fees on running our pension/insurance funds) to trading for the Bank’s own account (speculative proprietary trading with high returns).
Brown and co know all this and that it will never be implemented. He is using it as a bit of Bank bashing ahead of the election. The real way would be to tax the banks investment banking profits and hit the high earners with a 100% tax above £100,000.
Of course really taking over the banks and using their tens of thousands of billions of pounds of assets for social use and closing down all their speculative businesses and turning their lending into social rents is the real way ahead. The Robin Hood Tax campaign is becoming a substitute for real action and something Brown and co can hide behind."
For those who haven't seen it here's the launch video, more details on the Robin Hood Tax campaign website.
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