Quote from Robert A. Green:
Just had lunch in Vegas with the CEO of a major trading school. He is from Germany and moved to the US in the early 1990s, so I asked him about Germany and FTT. He follows the German news closely too.
Learned a lot. Germany has few to no online or regular brokerage firms for traders. Investors are force fed bank owned mutual funds, where banks pick the investments. Probably channeling money to their lending customers and buttressing German industry I presume. So like the Vanguard mutual fund CEO in the US, they rail against the evils of trading and glorify buy and hold mutual fund investing. No wonder why German banking hasn't fought back harder against FTT.
Germans do hate speculation and think trading is evil and that traders and banks must pay now with FTT. They are dead set for a federal EU led by Germany and they want the German-led EU to run the world.
It's scary to think that Germans who are so biased and prejudiced against finance could one day dominate regulation and tax policy over finance. This must be fixed and not allowed.
I wrote a Comment about this in that FT article today. Germany is increasingly becoming the odd man out.
You say he moved to US in the 90s. Does he only follow the German news or does he actually live there for a few weeks or maybe months per year?
He is absolutely correct, that there are, compared to the US, only a few 'discount brokerages' (which are mostly still too expensive and unprofessional, so that more serious traders often use US-brokers, for example). Also, many Germans are quite 'anti-trading', 'anti-investing' and even hate speculation - or speculators, for that matter. And there is also the traditional 'Obrigkeitsgläubigkeit' (faith in authority) deeply rooted in German history, which, by principle, is at odds with free markets and indivudals. As a result of that, most Germans seem to be in favor of the FTT, unfortunately.
However, I think he is mistaken about the Germans thoughts about the EU. One should not confuse the published 'opinion' and the true opinion of most people here. Acutally, I would dare to say that most Germans now dislike the EU, and even view the Eurozone experiment as a failure. Just following the mainstream media gives a different view. To understand this, one must know that about 70% of German journalists adhere to a quite leftist (social democratic / green / left party) political view and one of their pet projects is the extension of EU bureaucracy and disempowerment of the nation states. So, regarding EU politics, they are extremely biased.
By the way, keep up the good work with the articles and the anti-FTT initiative.
