Buckley, Ross --- "A Financial Transactions Tax: The One Essential Reform" [2012] UNSWLRS 21

Last Updated: 12 July 2012

A Financial Transactions Tax: The One Essential Reform

Ross Buckley, University of New South Wales

This paper is available for download at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2104015

Citation

This paper was published at Vol 47 No 2 Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy, March/April 2012, 99-103. This paper may also be referenced as [2012] UNSWLRS 21.

Abstract

The financial markets have changed quite fundamentally in the last a few decades, yet the measures we use to regulate them have not really changed at all. The market patterns of high frequency trading, computer generated activity and short-termism are now well entrenched, and will be difficult to change. Of the various ways available to seek to encourage this change, the best, in my view, is a financial transactions tax (FTT). When one analyses most of what has been written of late about the EU’s proposed FTT, one finds it to be riddled with myths, inaccuracies and untruths. This paper analyses seven most common myths of FTT.