IMF presses for tax on banks’ risky behaviour

The International Monetary Fund today threw its weight behind a new tax on the global financial sector designed to limit risky speculative behaviour and help the world's poorest countries.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said banks and other big financial institutions were responsible for systemic risk and it was only right that they provided resources to mitigate those threats to the world economy.

While ruling out a so-called Tobin tax — a levy on foreign currency transactions proposed by the American economist James Tobin in the early 1970s — Strauss-Kahn said a high-level IMF team would work on proposals in the coming months.

Two comments:

1) Glad they've caught up with what some of us have been saying for some time

2) As ever, they call it wrong.

I'm not holding my breath.

PDF of article

Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:

There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.

You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.

And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:

Comments

When commenting, please take note of this blog's comment policy, which is available here. Contravening this policy will result in comments being deleted before or after initial publication at the editor's sole discretion and without explanation being required or offered.

Comments are closed.