Sunday, November 06, 2011

Speculation Surcharge

Demands grow stronger for a financial transactions tax. The financial industry, accustomed to gambling with our money, is against such taxation. But financial speculation should be more costly - a surcharge discourages the possibility of sudden runaway machine trading. It also raises funds for our wider society, now impoverished by the mega rich.

Our trading systems have ballooned such that speculative transactions are some $1.5 trillion per day, or fifty times more than global trade.


Read more on the "Tobin Tax" (link) or see this article from the rather conservative Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR, in Washington (link).