£2bn, €1bn… and $19bn. Proposed bank levies so far from the UK, France and US. The tide of ever smaller bank levies appears to be turning.
American banks with assets exceeding $50bn and hedge funds with assets over $10bn would be liable to pay the costs associated with financial reform. This from a proposal by Barney Frank late last night during discussions to finalise Wall Street reform. More on ft.com. Read more
France is aiming for a bank levy of €300m but ” would really like” €1bn, French finance minister Christine Lagarde has announced. Yikes. George Osborne’s feat — taxing the banks £2bn while reassuring them of a level playing field — seems a little less impressive. Might this put Mr Osborne off considering further bank levies?
Lucky for UK banks, then, that the UK levy is so small. And largely offset by corporation tax gains. Read more
Bank taxes: will they happen?
Should we feel sorry for the International Monetary Fund? Quite often the answer is yes. The Fund gets passed an international hot potato to write a report about because countries cannot agree; it then writes an equivocal report; and then gets it in the neck when – surprise, surprise – countries do not like the findings.
On the international tax on banks two of these three features apply. The Fund was asked by the Group of 20 to investigate how to make banks contribute to the taxpayer support they enjoyed when there was no consensus at all last September; and countries such as Canada and Japan hate the Fund’s report. But in this instance, the Fund did not write an equivocal report. The leadership of the IMF are fully signed up to the principle of an international tax on banks and have been staunch advocates of taxing banks for some time.
As the report says:
“Expecting taxpayers to support the sector during bad times while allowing owners, managers, and/or creditors of financial institutions to enjoy the full gains of good times misallocates resources and undermines long-term growth. The unfairness is not only objectionable, but may also jeopardize the political ability to provide needed government support to the financial sector in the future.”
The big question is whether a new tax on banks (or two new taxes as the IMF is proposing) will ever happen. Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
