1/4% Tax on all stock trades pushed in NY Times today

This EU, EZ and euro debt crisis has stress-tested the EU treaties and governance and there are huge problems that need correction. How can you have a common euro currency in only parts of the EU - but not in the money-center London - and provide all EU members easy access to debt and trade credit, without having common taxes, regulation and enforcement? It's a recipe for run away government spending and debt.

German exporters made a fortune selling to PIIGS on euro-denominated debt and now the German government wants UK banks to pay that debt bill by charging them FTT. This reminds me of the US government and GSEs creating sub prime borrowers and then asking traders and banks to foot the bill with FTT. PIIGS are subprime countries.

EU-centrists need fiscal integration and that's a huge and probably unfeasible undertaking at this juncture. The unattractive choice is go all in on EU fiscal union, or have PIIGS bankruptcies. That's not inviting to voters and you can't avoid referendums for passing a new fiscal union. Fiscal union will fail with voters and that process would take too long anyway. It requires unanimous-referendum consent, and a 5% chance of passage would be overstating the odds.

VAT indirect FTT will be on the front lines of this fiscal union effort and act of desperation, and it's going to fail and maybe bring down the whole EU and EZ. Democrats and Republicans are at historic odds in the US, but we are stuck together. Is the UK stuck together with France and Germany? Is Germany stuck together with Italy and Greece? Probably not.

From the perch of our microcosm FTT, it looks like the EU is going to fracture more in 2012.
 
The EC claims the financial sector enjoys a tax advantage of around E18bn because of the VAT exemption. Yet the EC says itself this estimate should be treated with caution.

“The reality is the sector already pays very significant amounts of irrecoverable VAT to EU governments which would become recoverable if the sector became subject to tax. Even if VAT were chargeable on financial services, business consumers could generally recover it so governments may not get as much as they expect.
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Quote from Explorer:

http://www.cliffordchance.com/publi...s/2011/10/financial_transactiontaxupdate.html
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Excellent report thanks. The third choice of what happens next seems the way Brussels might go. EZ FTT and squeeze London with half of it anyway.

This lawyer report also seems a little unsure on closing the financial service exemption in VAT, and squeezing FTT into existing VAT.

The "cascading effects" discussion is a must read and very good. It explains the difference between UK stamp duty - paid once by final user - versus FTT paid throughout the transaction over and over again. .1% FTT is really 1%.

The current EU FTT proposal is half-cocked and not well conceived.

Do France and Germany even have enough votes in the EZ to pass a FTT or VAT FTT? What's the vote count and minimum needed for that?
 
Quote from Robert A. Green:

....The "cascading effects" discussion is a must read and very good. It explains the difference between UK stamp duty - paid once by final user - versus FTT paid throughout the transaction over and over again. .1% FTT is really 1%.....
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From the Clifford Chance report: "If the securities pass through market makers as well then the rate will be even higher."


And with the individual traders out of business, bid-ask cost will increase to an estimated 2 percent per round turn.

I have read on ET, but not from the source that UK stamp duty is levied on only 3 percent of all transactions. Even that 0.5 percent rate is largely diluted within funds and amounts to about ten times less at 0.05 percent in additional charges spread across various other investments.

Those points are seldom mentioned in reports, and intentionally ignored by pro FTT economists like Baker that proponents quote.
 
Hi Everyone -- I completed a massive overhaul of http://www.financialtransactiontaxes.com...only to have it demolished by a denial-of-service attack. (really?!?!) For reasons I don't fully understand, the incident also corrupted the files in the online flash program I'd use to assemble the pages themselves, which meant the entire weekend's work was, suddenly, up-in-smoke.

Long story short, I've cobbled together something until I can get my support ticket resolved (hopefully tomorrow), but it's about 15% of what was there.

Weird situation with the homepage. The old homepage is still there when you go to the site. But if you click on "home" at the top of the page, the new homepage appears. That old homepage is gone asap ... just don't know when "asap" is.

Inside pages are now some odd amalgamation of old design with new background color. All those creaky visual jokes with the blonde girl will be gone, though there there for now.

Bottom line, for the moment, the site looks like shit. I'll do what I can this week but, for the most part, my focus will be on making some bank. Hopefully, I can get things more-or-less as they should be by the week's end.

The new homepage, which doesn't display that way yet due to the aforementioned technical difficulties, can be found at

http://www.financialtransactiontaxes.com/Blank.html

Please take a look at it and tell me what you think. Your feedback is MOST important; my only goal is to create something that we'll all find useful.

I'd be much more depressed about this weekend if the trading gods hadn't handed me a short on the ES off 1270. Nice way to make up for the grief.

Thanks again for your support.

P.S. Oh, one other thing ... I've been moved to more robust, anti-denial of service servers. For the time being (probably until tomorrow), info@financialtransactiontaxes.com is not working. So if you want to contact me, please use financialtransactiontax@yahoo.com. Thnx
 
tortoise,

It's not hard to guess who launched the denial-of-service attack. Your website is a clear and present danger to the pro-FTT propaganda machine. They've had the concert hall to themselves for the past two years and they're not planning on sharing it with anyone else.

The pro-FTT crowd must be feeling pretty low right now. The G20 meeting was a bust for them with only a handful of member nations expressing unconditional support for the FTT. This past week in Brussels, the EU FTT was opposed by a record number of countries, some of whom had never publicly expressed an opinion about the tax before. And here in the US, the Obama administration reiterated its position against the FTT saying that most of the tax falls on retail investors, not on financial institutions, and therefore the FTT is unacceptable.

Also, I took a look at the new page you posted. I like your revised approach. I know it's far from finished, but you're definitely headed in the right direction.

Keep up the good work.

Best regards,

Tom


Quote from tortoise:

Hi Everyone -- I completed a massive overhaul of http://www.financialtransactiontaxes.com...only to have it demolished by a denial-of-service attack. (really?!?!) For reasons I don't fully understand, the incident also corrupted the files in the online flash program I'd use to assemble the pages themselves, which meant the entire weekend's work was, suddenly, up-in-smoke.

Long story short, I've cobbled together something until I can get my support ticket resolved (hopefully tomorrow), but it's about 15% of what was there.
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Quote from tortoise:

Hi Everyone -- I completed a massive overhaul of http://www.financialtransactiontaxes.com...only to have it demolished by a denial-of-service attack. (really?!?!)
...

P.S. Oh, one other thing ... I've been moved to more robust, anti-denial of service servers. For the time being (probably until tomorrow), info@financialtransactiontaxes.com is not working. So if you want to contact me, please use financialtransactiontax@yahoo.com. Thnx
More...

Good move to newer servers. There is a simple php script out there that exploits the GoDaddy hosting weaknesses that many of these denial of service attacks use. I hope your choice of server is something other than on the GoDaddy system

Also, a little heads up, but someone from Mass. registered .net, .info, .org, and .co of the same address on the 9th after you went public with your site. I expect this is done for Google search confusion.
 
Quote from JamesL:

Good move to newer servers. There is a simple php script out there that exploits the GoDaddy hosting weaknesses that many of these denial of service attacks use. I hope your choice of server is something other than on the GoDaddy system

Also, a little heads up, but someone from Mass. registered .net, .info, .org, and .co of the same address on the 9th after you went public with your site. I expect this is done for Google search confusion.
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thanks. no longer on godaddy.

what a weird, weird world...

The site's still a mess, and I'm waiting on mysterious backend people to get the bottom of it all. Later this week, I'll roll up my sleeves again and get back to it.

I had an extensive deconstruction/fact-check/error-analysis of the hilarious robin hood tax site, which is now completely GONE. will reconstruct and repost on bulletproof server configuration as soon as I can...

In the meantime, I need to go make the rent money...
 
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