European countries planning a tax on financial transactions are set to drastically scale back the levy, cutting the charge by as much as 90 percent and delaying its full roll-out for years, in what would be a major victory for banks.
Such sweeping changes would blunt the impact of the tax, pushed for by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and popular with voters who blame bankers for the financial crisis.
The revisions have yet to be formally proposed but were revealed to Reuters by officials working on the project.
Banks have lobbied furiously against the tax, due to be levied by Germany, France and nine other European states. It has also hit legal challenges from Britain, which will not join the tax but fears being forced to collect it on behalf of other EU states, driving business from London's financial center.
So bankers win again.
And ordinary people suffer once more.
The fight for justice has to go on.
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Well, until ‘ordinary people’ work to achieve a closer relationship with their representatives than the lobbyists successfully do, can we expect anything else but the financial elite to have their way.
Just as a matter of interest, Mr. M., do you blame any people who borrowed far too much as individuals when they were offered the chance to do so…..personal responsibility and all that…..
….or was it all the fault of the banks entirely along with the politicians?
98% the banks and its relationship with the advertising industry that sought to induce people into that debt
If you believe people are uninfluenced decision makes then you really are naive
The banks and industry knew exactly what they were doing
So, you imply, the borrowers didn’t know what they were doing.
Don’t you think perhaps they shouldn’t have borrowed, if they didn’t know what they were doing?
You ignore the power of advertising
What, the power to force people to sign contracts that they don’t want to sign?
My bank – along with several others – keeps offering me loans, credit cards, overdrafts, and so on. So far I’ve had no trouble at all in refusing to sign up to them, even when money was tight and nearly all our household income was going in rent and utilities for a small flat.
I can walk past a bakery and think “that smells nice” without needing to rush in and buy a cake or pasty, too. But I don’t think I’m terribly unusual in that.
So why do you think banks promoted loans so heavily?
So Pellinor, given the high cost of rental accommodation readily available in the UK, particularly in the largest jobs market, London, what is the alternative?
Perhaps it is to build more moderate cost social housing?
Oh sorry, I forgot that’s seemingly impossible to do today!
I don’t know all the answers, I just know that some suggested ones seem to be wrong.
With the high prices in London, then the answers seem to be to move out of London. Certainly it’s a reason I haven’t moved into London, despite there being a lot of good jobs in my field there.
More low cost housing would probably be good, and so far as I can tell new developments seem to include a lot of that – if it’s not working, perhaps the supply hasn’t been increased enough? Or maybe the accommodation is of the wrong sort? I know some people suggest that planning restrictions are too onerous, and relaxing them would increase the housing supply and so bring down prices, but I don’t know enough about that to be definitive.
There do seem to be complaints that there are a lot of long-term unemployed people in London, which not only makes housing benefit more expensive but also restricts the housing supply in an already expensive area. One option might therefore be to ask them to move to cheaper areas of the country – I haven’t looked at the figures, but I could well imagine that it might be worth while for housing benefit to fund the removals costs, if a sensible way of arranging that could be found.
But it’s a complex area that I don’t imagine admits of simple solutions.
More two and three bedroom housing is needed
Plus single units big enough for a single person to really live in – not just survive
That often require a ‘boxroom’
Also, if you’re suggesting that people have to borrow because of the high cost of living, then it seems a bit odd to criticise banks for lending the amounts that people need.
I thought Richard’s point was that banks were “inducing” people into debt – how do you unfairly induce someone into doing something they needed to do anyway?
If people needed to get into debt, then lending by banks was a good thing. It could only be a bad thing if they didn’t need to get into debt but banks somehow forced them into it – which I don’t think is the case.
Oh come on – the borrowing has to happen because the bankers captured the wealth and denied it to ordinary people in the first place and then want to make more by lending it back to them
Get real
Allen I would differentiate between those borrowed to have a holiday in the Bahamas and those who wanted a home. Many people had a choice between staying in rented property (which often cost as much as a mortgage) or over extending themselves. When I bought my first house in 1970, I could only borrow no more than three times my salary. Now people often borrow five or six times. If they wanted a place of their own, they had to borrow. Property prices rose way ahead of incomes because of the expansion of the money supply.
The reason they can borrow a higher multiple is because interest rates are so low. Imagine what will happen when the decision is made to increase the rates.
But you cannot blame the house price bubble just on the relaxation of lending constraints. When I bought my first house in 1973, on similar terms as you mention, prices had doubled in a couple of years. Unfortunately, having bought in a panic that prices would continue to climb beyond our means, 1973 was the peak and prices in real terms decreased significantly thereafter.