Curtis and Nighy’s brilliant little idea
February 10th, 2010
In this short video made by Richard Curtis of Four Weddings & A Funeral fame, the actor Bill Nighy plays a typically complacent banker. He squirms at suggestions that banks should be asked to pay a global ‘Tobin tax’ of less than 0.05% on certain types of transaction.
It’s a commendable effort, and effectively launches the “Robin Hood Tax” campaign which is seeks to try to make members of our blinkered political elite recognise that this is an idea whose time has come. (By the way Gordon Brown is behind the initiative and believe’s chairman Lord Turner).
A prominent group of 200 US economists including James K Galbraith recently came out in favour of such a tax, stating that it would have the positive effect of curbing speculation on international financial markets at the same time as raising hundreds of billions to redistribute to the world’s poorer nations and to invest in things like renewable energy.
“The cost of trading financial assets has plummeted over the last three decades as a result of computerization. This has led to an enormous explosion in trading volume, with most trades having little economic or social value and redistributing disproportionate resources to the financial sector … A set of modest financial transactions taxes, which would just raise trading costs back to the level of two or three decades ago, would have very limited impact on trades that have real economic value. Such taxes could both reduce the volume of speculation in financial markets and provide substantial revenue for either important public purposes and/or deficit reduction.”
Predictably enough, there is no shortage of sabre rattlers within the banking sector who are keen to smear Nighy and Curtis and trash the proposal. They are warning that, a global financial transactions tax, even one set as low as 0.05%, would be a danger to the capitalist system, push Libor up to 20% etc. Most of such claims — many of which are evident as comments on a recent blog post by Toby Young — are nonsense.
The City has coped perfectly well with Stamp Duty on share transactions, for example, hasn’t it. There are also practical reasons why imposing and collecting such a tax might prove difficult (see this document from the IMF) and it is understood the IMF boss Dominque Strauss Kahn inttends to hype up some of these diffulties to scare off the scheme’s proponents.
However in my view Brown — and Curtis and Nighy — are to be commended for lending their weight to this particular campaign.
- To read my Qfinance blog on the Tobin tax, click here
- To visit the homepage for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, click here
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Short URL: http://www.ianfraser.org/?p=1025
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