Quote from bjw:
in 15 minutes the European Parliament will hold a live press conference on smth ftt-related. no idea what, could be completely unimportant, but it is live:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ep-live/en/other-events/video?event=20120206-1430-SPECIAL&vodtype=Live [/B]
the press-conference was about the new EU report on the effects of an FTT. it was classic, stand up comedy. Filled with pro-FTT bullshit that has already been disproven extensively, and two elder ladies (one of which is supposedly a professor of some sort) who clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Too bad none of the journalists asked the right questions
stuff i didn't know:
- if i understand correctly the tax they propose has now been revised from a residency-based to a residency-based AND an exchange-based. So, no more exemptions for non-EU trading EU securities. It's unclear to me how they will collect the tax of EU trading non EU-securities though.
- even if only a few counties adopt it, the EP thinks it's a good idea. it doesn't need to be EU-wide. let those examples convince the world (yeah right, in the same way the UK stamp tax has convinced the world -> not)
stuff that was clearly false:
- they claimed 8 eu-countries already have some sort of an FTT. Uhh.. what? Am I ignorant? Only the UK comes to mind.
- the ridiculos overexageration on how succesful the UK stamp tax is. Hardly any avoidance (why didn't a journalist ask if the so-called prof knows what a CFD is and why it's so popular in the UK? Or a spread-bet?)
- I could go on for a while.
stuff that made me laugh:
- in the end the elder lady basically said: maybe we should stop talking about all these studies, but just do it. and then after 3 years we evaluate, what's the harm in that? so sad.
In short, what we already knew, the European Parliament is one of our real enemies here and they're not going to cave down until every single one of the member states does. Our hopes lie with the individual member states. Best scenario still is France (and maybe 1-3 smaller countries) doing this alone and the whole thing blowing up.