A safe bet?

Posted on

A C Grayling in the Guardian:

Whatever new framework emerges from this mess, [short selling] and other potentially wrecking practices will have to come under the sort of control that will stop them being such a sure bet against the rest of us. The only thing that prevents greed is a guaranteed danger of burning your fingers to the knuckle if you go too far. One simple idea: taxes on profits from short-selling should be very high to start and rapidly incremental thereafter. That makes the greed motive work against itself, since profit maximising is the chief, if not the only, prompt for action in the financial markets.

Such a provision might, for example, have made the raiders on Halifax Bank of Scotland go homeward to think again. But I'll bet - another safe bet - that the paladins in striped suits will try to talk the FSA and Treasury out of making any such provision.

Depressingly accurate, I fear.


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