Quote from TraDaToR:
I hope Geithner didn't change mind after his meeting with Alistair Darling. He just said last time that he "hadn't seen proposals that made sense", that's all...
They did talk about all the proposals at the g20 meeting back in september. So we can assume , that Geitner has seen all the proposals and I am sure he has seen whats out there and what specific countries already have, I.E. UK stamp tax Brazil, etc.. I figured when he talks about he has not seen a proposal that makes sense, he knows the original tobin tax and others that have been around a long time. So thats a good thing so far, I think what came out of the g20 in september is what alot of people talked about was some countries proposing the tobin tax and US saying it doesnt make sense and thats when they initiated and tasked the IMF with the idea of the insurance fund based on the US model of the FDIC. The IMF doesnt come up with these things themselves, the are in the pocket of the us. Thats why it seems the IMF downplayed the idea of the tobin tax or financial transaction tax right after the g20 meeting when Dominic Strauss Kahn poured cold water on the idea. SO we know that many NGO'S and non profits who want to change the world want the tax , the people where it counts so far are thinking of other ways.
However, he said he didn't back plans for a so-called Tobin tax _ a flat tax on currency transactions named after the Nobel Prize laureate James Tobin. Tobin first made his proposal in the early 1970s when U.S. President Richard Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold and effectively brought an end to the global currency system that had prevailed since World War II.
Tobin said the tax would help limit instability arising from a world of floating exchange rates.
"The very simple idea of putting a tax on transactions won't work for many technical reasons," said Strauss-Kahn.
The IMF was asked to come up with proposals about some sort of tax on financial firms by the leaders of the Group of 20 rich and developing countries, largely on the behest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Lipsky agreed that the Tobin measure "seems out of date" but he accepted the general idea of deposit insurance, much like the U.S.'s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which was created in 1933 during the Great Depression when banks went under and depositors lost their savings.
