Krugman Should Read the Literature on Tobin Taxes
Krugman wrote an article that appeared yesterday in the NYT defending the Tobin tax, a tax on financial transactions, as a sensible way to "deter financial speculation."
Financial speculation by itself is not a problem, is a solution, and as an economist he should know that. It's worse however: his article transparently shows that he doesn't know anything about the literature on the subject (or doesn't bother to show his knowledge on it), but speaks as if he knows it (or as if he's showing his knowledge).
The Tobin tax has been discredited on many different grounds by many economists that have spent much more time than him trying to understand it. There's plenty of experimental, theoretical and empirical evidence against taxes that work like a Tobin tax. There's some less clear evidence in favor of it too, which however tends to show that the effects are only positive in special cases (probably not found in real markets) or that the benefits are not worth the costs. Krugman could start for example by reading my article on the negative economic effects of financial transactions taxes. Besides all that, Brazil just adopted a Tobin tax and market volatility didn't fall after its introduction on October 20.
Krugman may have won a Nobel Prize in Economics for deserved contributions to international trade theory, but this has not given him 007-like license to write about things he doesn't have a clue about. What he's been doing is a disservice to the profession of economics.
http://incentives-matter.blogspot.com/2009/11/krugman-should-read-literature-on-tobin.html
the author works in the Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Texas A&M International University